Consequences of Skipping Breakfast

            Since I have arrived at college it has become a common occurrence for me to skip breakfast. Because of my desire to sleep in before my morning classes, I do not wake up early enough to go down to the cafeteria and eat breakfast before class. This results in my first meal of the day being when I come back from class around 12 o clock. I also often skip breakfast on the weekends because I enjoy sleeping in until 11 or later. I noticed in reading other peoples food logs that I was not alone in skipping breakfast and that many of my classmates were doing the same thing. The notion that skipping breakfast is bad for you is always repeated, however there is actually statistical and medical evidence to support this claim. 

            The article, “Breakfast skipping and health-compromising behaviors in adolescents and adults” presents a statistical analysis that was done by The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition to test many variables such as the frequency of times a week a subject ate breakfast compared with the co-occurrence of health compromising factors such as smoking, alcohol use, sedentary lifestyle, and overweight or obesity. The study showed that, “The co-occurrence of two or more health-compromising factors was significantly (P<0.00001) more common among breakfast skippers than breakfast eaters,”(847). Given this information, it is hard to know whether there is a cause and effect relationship. This relationship between having these health-compromising factors and skipping breakfast could be related to other factors such as lower socio-economic status and the general lifestyles of that group of people. But still, this data does support the idea that skipping breakfast seems to be worse for your health.

             The study also showed that skipping breakfast led to more snacking later on in the day. I would say that this is true, if I do not eat breakfast I tend to snack more and eat a much larger lunch than I would have had I eaten breakfast. My total intake of calories to make up for skipping breakfast is probably greater than the amount of calories I would have absorbed had I just eaten breakfast. This is consistent with this study’s finding that a high BMI is associated with skipping breakfast (851).

            While more research needs to be done to show a completely persuasive argument that skipping breakfast is indeed bad for your health, this article does show many correlations that seem to suggest this. The article writes about the fact that it is not only adolescents that have a high frequency in skipping breakfast but also adults. Reading our food logs, I assumed that it was just common among college kids because of our fast paced lifestyles. But, reading this article I have seen that this is not true, adults also have fast paced lives and have a hard time fitting in breakfast. If the findings of this article are correct and skipping breakfast is bad for your health, then as a society we need to find a way to make morning breakfasts a more regular occurrence.

Work Cited

Keski-Rahkonen, A., Kaprio, J., Rissanen, A., Virkkunen, M., & Rose, R. J. (2003). Breakfast skipping and health-compromising behaviors in adolescents and adults. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 57(7), 842-53. doi:10.1038/sj.ejcn.1601618