Much research has been conducted on the benefits of eating breakfast, with generally positive health effects being shown for breakfast consumers. The most likely age group to skip breakfast are young adults, due to a combination of newly acquired independence and increased work and study commitments. Because obesity is increasing, particularly amongst young people, researchers are interested in associations between consuming or skipping breakfast and weight changes. To these ends, researchers1 have investigated the breakfast habits of 2615 young adults aged 20 to 39 years using 24-hour dietary recall, in order to determine associations with diet quality based on the healthy eating index and mean adequacy ratio for nutrient intake. The results showed that 25% of the subjects skipped breakfast regularly, 16.5% regularly consumed breakfast cereal and 58.5% had a non-cereal based breakfast. Amongst those that skipped breakfast, males comprised 59.6% of the total.
Those who skipped breakfast consumed more of their daily calories from added sugars, whereas those who consumed breakfast cereal had higher total intakes of fibre, total energy, percentage energy from carbohydrate and dietary fibre. Those who ate breakfast cereal also had higher intakes of certain micronutrients and diet quality was higher in this group. At breakfast, the regular cereal consumers had higher intakes of fruit, whole grains, dairy products, carbohydrates, total sugars, fibre and a number of micronutrients, compared to those who did not consume cereal. Those who did not consume cereal but had an alternative breakfast had higher intakes of meat or fish, eggs, total fat, cholesterol and sodium. These results suggest that consuming cereal at breakfast is associated with better healthy eating index score and higher mean adequacy ratio for nutrient intake, but it is unclear if these dietary preferences are beneficial to the health.
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