Why Teens Should Eat Breakfast
11:08 AM
Approximately 8 to 12 percent of all school-aged kids skip breakfast. By the time kids enter adolescence, as many as 20 to 30 percent of them have completely given up the morning meal.
Why Teens Say No to Breakfast
Children of all ages have many excuses for skipping breakfast. Many older teens are busy until late into the night with home work, extracurricular activities, and part-time jobs. They go to bed late, then get up and rush off to school, too frantic to eat.
The worst offenders are girls and older teens, though boys and younger adolescents are certainly not immune. Compounding the challenge is biology. As teens get older, they’re often more inclined to fall asleep later at night — it’s even natural for teens to be unable to fall asleep until 11 p.m., according to the National Sleep Foundation — and awaken later in the morning, a biological schedule that often doesn’t match the one set by schools. When that happens, most kids would rather snooze an extra 15 minutes then get up for a bowl of cereal.
“Many of them are not getting enough sleep,” says Marcie Beth Schneider, M.D., FAAP, a member of the AAP’s Committee on Nutrition and an adolescent medicine physician in Greenwich, Conn. “They often wake up too tired or too nauseous to eat.” Experts believe that some kids, especially girls, may be also bypassing the morning meal in an effort to control weight gain.
Breaking the Fast Is Healthy
A 2008 study in the journal Pediatrics found that adolescents who ate breakfast daily had a lower body mass index than teens who never ate breakfast or only on occasion.
Ironically, the breakfast eaters even ate more calories, fiber, and cholesterol in their overall diets compared to the kids who skipped breakfast. But the kids who ate breakfast also had diets with less saturated fat. “We know that the biggest predictor of overeating is undereating,” Dr. Schneider says. “Many of these kids skip breakfast and lunch, but then go home and don’t stop eating.”
Eating breakfast also has ramifications on school performance. “Study after study shows that kids who eat breakfast function better,” Dr. Schneider says. “They do better in school, and have better concentration and more energy.”
Breakfast is also an opportunity to feed your child bone-building calcium and vitamin D. Kids enter their peak bone-building years in adolescence and continue building bone into their early 20s. Although vitamin D is best known for its role in promoting the absorption of calcium, new studies show vitamin D may also boost immunity and help prevent infections.
Take Action
With weight gain and obesity becoming a major public health concern, experts agree that the push to get teens to the breakfast table is an important one. So how do you get your teen to chow down in the A.M.? Start by setting an earlier bedtime, which helps ensure that your child will get up in time to eat something. Then make breakfast a priority in your home. Ideally, the whole family can sit down together for breakfast, a practice that should start well before the teen years. “Families that eat together tend to eat healthier,” Dr. Cochran says. “It also gives parents the chance to act as role models in terms of nutrition and eating behaviors.”
If mornings are too difficult to orchestrate a sit-down meal, try having some easy-to-go breakfast foods available for your child. Good options include yogurt, granola bars, dried cereal, breakfast bars, fresh fruit, and dried fruit. Let her take it and eat it on the way to school if possible, or encourage her to go to school and buy breakfast, which most schools now make available. “Ideally, a breakfast should have all the food groups represented,” Dr. Schneider says. But anything nutritious they grab on their way out the door works. “What’s important is that they get some healthy carbohydrates, which provide energy,” says Dr. Schneider.
One beverage that kids should omit from their morning meal: coffee and energy drinks. While the craving for a quick pick-me-up is certainly understandable, caffeine raises blood pressure and heart rate in teens, Dr. Schneider says.
Excerpts taken from “The Case for Eating Breakfast” by HealthyChildren.org. Read more: http://www.healthychildren.org/English/healthy-living/nutrition/pages/The-Case-for-Eating-Breakfast.aspx?nfstatus=401&nftoken=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000&nfstatusdescription=ERROR%3a+No+local+token
Best Teen Diets recommends healthy well balanced eating that includes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, protein and low-fat or fat-free dairy. We offer nutrition information for parents, teens and educators that emphasizes the importance of healthy eating for teens.
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