Making breakfast part of the regular school day is one of the simplest and most effective ways to fight childhood hunger. But some schools have been wary of instituting "breakfast in the classroom" programs for fear that kids would be eating too much.
But a new report out this week in the journal Pediatric Obesity shows that skipping breakfast is much more likely to cause obesity in kids than eating breakfast twice.
"Students who skipped or ate breakfast inconsistently were more than twice as likely to be overweight or obese compared with students who ate double breakfasts," said Jeannette Ickovics, a professor at Yale School of Public Health and one of the the paper’s authors.
The study follows the morning eating habits of 600 middle-school students over time: some ate no breakfast, some ate a single breakfast at home or at school, and some ate twice. The result: Weight gain among students who ate "double breakfast" was no different than that among all other students. Meanwhile, the risk of obesity doubled among students who skipped breakfast or ate it inconsistently.
