What's with breakfast?

Breakfast is considered an important meal because it breaks the overnight fasting period, replenishes your supply of glucose and provides other essential nutrients to keep your energy levels up throughout the day.

Glucose
Glucose is the body’s energy source. It is broken down and absorbed from the carbohydrates you eat. In the morning, after you have gone without food for as long as 12 hours, your glucose levels have dropped. Your body compensates by releasing the glucose that has been stored in your muscle tissue and liver, called glycogen.

Once all of the energy from the glycogen stores is used up, your body starts to break down fatty acids to produce the energy it needs. Without carbohydrate, fatty acids are only partially oxidised, which can cause reduced energy levels. So eating breakfast can boost your energy levels as well as your metabolism for the day.

Essential vitamins, minerals and nutrients
Breakfast provides a significant proportion of the day’s total nutrient intake and offers the opportunity to eat foods fortified with nutrients such as folate, iron, B vitamins and fibre. Essential vitamins, minerals and other nutrients can only be gained from food. So, even though your body can usually find enough energy to make it to the next meal, you still need to top up your vitamin and mineral levels to maintain health and vitality.

Skipping breakfast
Extensive research in Australia and overseas has found:

• Many children who skip breakfast are significantly heavier than those who eat breakfast.
• Skipping breakfast can diminish mental performance. Breakfast helps learning, as you are better able to pay attention and are more interested in learning.
• Eating high fibre breakfast cereals reduces fatigue.
• Children who eat an inadequate breakfast are more likely to make poor food choices for the rest of the day and in the long term.
• People who eat breakfast have more nutritious diets than people who skip breakfast. They also have better eating habits as they are less likely to be hungry for snacks during the day.

‘Going without’ becomes more common with advancing age – approximately 15 per cent of teenagers and one-third of adults don’t eat breakfast.

Why we skip breakfast
Some common reasons for skipping breakfast include:

• Not enough time
• Too tired to bother
• Wanting to spend the extra time dozing in bed
• No readily available breakfast foods in the house.

A healthy breakfast may reduce risk of illness
Compared to children who regularly eat breakfast, those who skip breakfast tend to consume fewer kilojoules overall and yet they experience the same rates of overweight and obesity.

There are a number of theories for this. There is some evidence that large meals are more likely to lead to weight gain than smaller, more frequent meals. This is because excess kilojoules eaten during one sitting are stored as body fat, once the glycogen storage areas are full. People who skip breakfast are usually ravenous by lunchtime and tend to eat more to compensate.

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