Brainy Breakfasts - How breakfast can improve performance

Breakfast Science
‘Breakfast’ means just that: breaking the overnight fast. Eating breakfast restocks the energy stores that have been depleted overnight and fuels your body for the day. Going to work or sending your child to school without breakfast is like trying to use a cordless power tool without recharging the battery. If you don't refuel your child's body in the morning, the child has to draw fuel from their own energy stores until lunchtime. The stress hormones necessary to mobilise these energy reserves may leave the child feeling irritable, tired and unable to learn or behave well. If you want your child to rise and shine rather than limp along sluggishly at school all morning, make sure their day gets off to a nutritious start.

Breakfast Research
If your household has a hectic morning rush hour like mine, you may feel that you don't have time for a healthy breakfast. But consider what studies have shown:

• Breakfast eaters are likely to achieve higher grades, pay closer attention, participate more in class discussions and manage more complex academic problems than those who skip breakfast.
• Breakfast skippers are more likely to be inattentive, sluggish and achieve lower grades.
• Breakfast skippers are more likely to show erratic eating patterns throughout the day, eat less nutritious foods and give into junk-food cravings. They may crave a mid-morning sugar fix because they can't make it all the way to lunchtime on an empty fuel tank.
• Some children are more vulnerable to the effects of missing breakfast than others and the effects on behaviour and learning vary from child to child.
• Whether children eat breakfast affects their learning, but so does what they eat. Children who eat a breakfast containing both complex carbohydrates and proteins in equivalent amounts of calories, tend to show better learning and performance than children who eat primarily a high protein or a high carbohydrate breakfast. Breakfasts high in carbohydrates with little protein seem to sedate children rather than stimulate their brain to learn.
• Children eating high calcium foods for breakfast (e.g. dairy products) showed enhanced behaviour and learning.
• Morning stress increases the levels of stress hormones in the bloodstream. This can affect behaviour and learning in two ways. First, stress hormones themselves can bother the brain. Secondly, stress hormones can increase carbohydrate cravings throughout the day. The food choices that result may affect behaviour and learning in children who are sensitive to the ups and downs of blood sugar levels. Try to send your child to school with a calm attitude, as well as a good breakfast.
• Breakfast sets the pattern for nutritious eating throughout the rest of the day. When children miss breakfast to save time or to cut calories, they set themselves up for erratic binging and possibly overeating for the rest of the day.

Brainpower Breakfast Foods

• Complex Carbohydrates: Multigrain or whole-wheat bread, flatbread, tortillas and crackers; whole-grain pasta; brown rice; oatmeal (regular oats have a lower glycemic index than quick-cooking or instant oats); whole-grain pancakes; whole-wheat frozen waffles.
• Protein: Eggs (cooked that morning or hard boiled in advance); leftover chicken, turkey, or fish; low fat cheese; beans (which can also count toward the complex carbohydrate requirement); natural peanut butter.

Add a piece of fruit and a glass of low fat milk and your child will be ready to learn all morning long with no energy crash!

Mrs Sue Zweck, Head of Teaching and Learning K-5