Should You Skip Your Morning Meal?
Adults who skip breakfast are likely to miss out on key nutrients that are most abundant in the foods that make up morning meals, a new study suggests. An analysis of data on more than 30,000 American adults showed that skipping breakfast — and missing out on the calcium in milk, vitamin C in fruit, and the fiber, vitamins and minerals found in fortified cereals — likely left adults low on those nutrients for the entire day.
“What we’re seeing is that if you don’t eat the foods that are commonly consumed at breakfast, you have a tendency not to eat them the rest of the day. So those common breakfast nutrients become a nutritional gap,” said Christopher Taylor, professor of medical dietetics in the College of Medicine at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s latest dietary guidelines, calcium, potassium, fiber and vitamin D are considered “dietary components of public health concern” for the general U.S. population — with iron added for pregnant women — because shortages of those nutrients are associated with health problems.
Excerpted from Science Daily
