What is it about?
This study asked whether eating a healthy breakfast had an impact on how people were able to concentrate on a demanding attention task over the rest of the morning and early afternoon, and if it made a difference if that breakfast was very healthy (oatmeal) or just a typical cereal (cornflakes). The surprising result was that when people skipped breakfast, they were definitely much hungrier, but they were just as good at maintaining task performance.
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Why is it important?
The work dispels the myth that breakfast is critical to cognitive performance in the morning and early afternoon hours.
Perspectives
We often hear it said that breakfast is the day's most important meal and many believe that it has a major impact on academic and cognitive performance in the early part of the day. This work suggests that eating breakfast may not be so important after all. But, a major point needs to be made here. The people who participated in this study were healthy young adults who were only being asked to skip breakfast on one morning. Of course, there are many children worldwide who do not get to eat a healthy breakfast most of the time due to poverty, and studies of performance in these individuals, who experience protracted periods of hunger and malnutrition, would likely show a different result. Studies of cognitive performance in these populations are badly needed.
John Foxe
University of Rochester
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Macronutrient composition of a morning meal and the maintenance of attention throughout the morning, Nutritional Neuroscience, July 2017, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/1028415x.2017.1347998.
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