The Importance of Breakfast Daily
Young people who skip the first meal of the day have a higher body mass index.
Teenagers who eat breakfast every day have a body mass index lower than those who skip the first meal of the day or never taken. This is the main conclusion of a study published in the journal ‘Pediatrics’.
Children and adolescents are becoming increasingly obese due to the change in dietary habits and physical inactivity. Although the reasons are unknown, breakfast seems to intervene in this equation and find out it was one of the goals of Project EAT (Food in Adolescents, as its acronym in English), developed in the United States.
The work, published this week, focuses on the partnership between the first meal of the day and the body mass index (BMI) a parameter used to determine the adequacy of the weight of a person who is calculated by dividing weight in kilograms by the square of the height in meters.
In the first phase of the project, 4,746 students with an average of 15 years completed during the 1998-99 school year a questionnaire about their eating habits that also included questions about the frequency with which the breakfast and taking steps to lose weight (diets, saltase meals, etc..). In addition, measures were collected on your height and weight.
The girls were always avoided breakfast
Study also showed that girls were most often always avoided this food (16.4% compared to 13% of boys).
Five years later, 2,216 of the students responded to questions via e-mail to establish changes in their eating habits, as well as their anthropometric measurements and the same relationship was observed between BMI and the frequency of breakfast.
The questionnaire revealed that the diets of adolescents varied according to how often they ate in the early hours. The girls who always breakfast ingestion more calories, fiber and cholesterol than those who did not and never boys were detected differences in the consumption of carbohydrates and fiber, more common in the ‘desayunadores’. The total percentage of fat and calories from saturated fat was also lower in the latter.
“This profile diet has the potential to improve the energy balance and weight control because the consumption of foods rich in fiber improves figures glucose and insulin and promotes a greater sense of satiety and reduced body mass index,” writes the authors. In addition, practitioners of this healthy habit had a life more active than their peers.
Therefore, despite the increased calorie intake, those who most frequently take breakfast had a BMI lower than the rest and less engaged in practices to lose weight. This, according to the authors, “could indicate that teens who stop doing this food they do in order to control weight”, a trend more common among females.
From the findings of Project EAT shows the need to “put more emphasis on promoting the habit of breakfast, especially among adolescents and young adults, where the behavior patterns are developing and stabilizing,” says the study, which highlights what easy and it is this practice that food and the importance of that is healthy, including cereals, skimmed milk and fresh fruit.
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