Children having two breakfasts might be healthier than those who skip breakfast
STATES CHRONICLE – If you happen to be a fan of the Lord of the Rings you definitely know the very long list of meals that hobbits have in only one day, which included two breakfasts. While that was fantasy, it turns out that having two breakfasts is actually better for children and you could probably convince them to eat by telling them about Merry and Pippin.
How can eating two breakfasts help? After all, we are all afraid that our children will be eating too much and too unhealthy and will become overweight. Well, according to a new study conducted by a team at Yale School of Public Health, middle school students who eat breakfast at school are less likely to become overweight or risk obesity than the ones who skip breakfast.
So, even if your kid has had breakfast at home, you might want to encourage them to eat at school too. This isn’t the first study that looks at the benefits of having breakfast at school. Previous studies have showed that eating breakfast in school can be associated with a healthy body weight, better health overall and improved academic performance.
However, it was feared that a second breakfast might lead to gaining too much weight, but this recent study proves there is no need to worry. The study showed that students skipping breakfast or having it inconsistently were twice as likely to become obese than the ones who had double breakfasts. Moreover, comparing the ones who ate two breakfasts with the ones who ate only one, there was no difference in weight gain from 5th to 7th grade.
The problem is that many of the America’s obese people are children. One-third of the kids between 6 and 11 are either overweight or obese and everyone is working to find solutions to these problems.
Children need to have a balanced diet, which means not only to eat healthy, but also to eat at normal hours without skipping any meals. Policy makers are thinking that a good solution would be introducing and promoting breakfast in schools but studies are being conducted to make sure this plan will work and will not lead instead to en excess of calories.
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