Breakfast Really Is the Most Important Meal of the Day for Kids’ School Performance

School children in England and Wales who reported regularly eating a healthy breakfast scored higher on standardized tests than those reporting having less-healthy breakfasts or not regularly having breakfast at all.

Even though breakfast consumption consistently has been linked with positive health outcomes and better cognitive functioning in schoolchildren, definitive evidence of a direct link between breakfast and educational outcomes is lacking. Accordingly, a team of researchers led by Hannah J. Littlecott at the Centre for the Development and Evaluation of Complex Interventions for Public Health Improvement (DECIPHer), in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University in Wales, set out to examine whether and how eating breakfast was associated with educational outcomes 6 to 18 months later among 9- to 11-year-olds.

The findings were published earlier this fall in the journal Public Health Nutrition.

As part of their analysis of breakfast behaviors, more than 4,400 schoolchildren from more than 100 elementary schools were asked to list everything they had consumed in the previous 24 hours (a time period spanning 2 breakfasts), and at which specific times they ate or drank each given food and beverage, as well as what they had eaten for breakfast that morning.

The children’s scores on the Statutory Assessment Test (SAT) before the study served as a baseline to which their scores on the next SAT 6 to 18 months later were compared. The researchers found that children who reported having eaten breakfast regularly were twice as likely to score above average than kids who did not report having eaten breakfast. Eating unhealthy foods such as sweets and chips at breakfast, however, was not shown to improve scores. The researchers also found that better academic performance was significantly associated with how many healthy breakfast foods (such as fruits and vegetables) a child consumed, as well as with the number of unhealthier foods eaten throughout the rest of the day.

“Significant positive associations between self-reported breakfast consumption and educational outcomes were observed,” the authors concluded. They called for more research exploring exactly how breakfast consumption and educational outcomes are linked, and how to promote breakfast consumption among schoolchildren.

“While this survey was conducted with children of primary-school age, research has shown that breakfast consumption declines once children begin secondary school,” they noted. “This suggests that an interesting avenue for further research would be to investigate the effects of any drop in breakfast eating behaviour in secondary school on trajectories in young people’s educational performance.”

—Michael Gerchufsky, ELS, CMPP