Begin with Breakfast

Race car drivers always begin the race on a full tank of gas. For many of the same reasons, your child should start his day the same way. Eating breakfast is the pre-race pit stop you should make sure your child takes. Indeed, breakfast is widely regarded as the most important meal of the day because it breaks the overnight fasting period, replenishes your child's supply of glucose, and provides other essential nutrients to keep his energy level up throughout the day.

Glucose, the body's energy source, is broken down and absorbed from the carbohydrates we eat, and it accounts for around 0.1% of our blood volume. By the time morning rolls around, our bodies have gone without food for as long as twelve hours, causing our glucose levels, or blood sugar, to drop. When this happens, our bodies compensate by releasing the glucose stored in our muscle tissue and liver, called glycogen. Once all of the energy from the glycogen stores is used up, the body breaks down fatty acids to produce energy. But fatty acids cannot be converted into glucose, so some body protein from muscle has to be broken down and converted to glucose to get the body's necessary fuel.

Some of the essential vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients can be gained only from food, not from stored glucose. So even though your body can usually find enough energy to make it to the next meal, it's not a good idea to let a body—least of all a growing body—steal resources from itself to find energy for the day. Around one in eight American children skip breakfast. "Going without" becomes more common with advancing age: approximately 15% of teenagers and one-third of adults don't eat breakfast. Just as the racer who starts the race with half a tank of gas must stop to refuel (thereby allowing other racers to pass), children and adults who go without breakfast demonstrate diminished energy levels and decreased ability to concentrate at school and work, with resulting decreases in performance.

One study found that schoolchildren who don't eat breakfast have much lower levels of iron, zinc, dietary fiber, calcium, and vitamin B₂ than children who do take the time to have breakfast. It appears that refueling with lunch, dinner, and snacks isn't sufficient to make up the nutritional deficit and provide full energy levels or performance. Other studies suggest a link to obesity in those who regularly skip breakfast. Compared to children who regularly eat breakfast, those who skip breakfast tend to consume fewer calories overall and yet they experience slightly higher rates of overweight and obesity! People who skip breakfast are usually ravenous by lunchtime and tend to eat more of the wrong types of foods to compensate.

Given all this, do what's necessary in your morning routine to make sure your child gets nutritious food and the time to eat it. While you're at it, change your own routine and make breakfast a part of your morning scramble as well.

More on: Healthy Meals for Families

Excerpted from:

From Raising Healthy Eaters: 100 Tips for Parents by Henry Legere, M.D. Copyright © 2004. Used by arrangement with The Perseus Books Group.

To order this book visit perseusbooksgroup.com.