Breakfast key to kickstart your childs day
Instead, we tend to offer a more nuanced appraisal of the food in question.
For example, in relation to its substantial iron content, we might be enthusiastic about encouraging young women or children to eat red meat. However, the saturated fat content of red meat means that recommending an increased intake to those with high cholesterol levels wouldn’t be appropriate.
The problem with all these provisos, caveats and qualifications is that they can cause serious confusion for consumers, and nowhere is this more keenly felt than by parents trying to provide their kids with a healthy diet.
For this reason, sometimes simplicity is the order of the day — food groups are divided into health-promoting foods (breakfast cereals, fruits and vegetables, low-fat dairy products) and health-damaging foods (sugary foods and drinks, fatty and fried foods). However, even with this approach, some residual issues remain.
The classic example is breakfast cereal. These foods were originally invented and manufactured by WK Kellogg, a 19th century industrialist and philanthropist whose philosophical objective was to promote the health of those who consumed his company’s products. This meant that the fortification of his breakfast cereals with additional health-promoting vitamins and minerals became an industry-standard for other companies wanting to enter the market. The recipients of Kellogg’s benevolence were, and remain, the children who consume fortified breakfast cereals on a regular basis.
Throughout the scientific literature, there are well-designed studies published by eminent researchers in reputable journals which show that the nutritional, bodyweight and general health status of children who consume ready-to-eat breakfast cereals (RTEBCs) all tend to be better than those of their breakfast-skipping peers. There are even some studies which suggest that RTEBC consumption is associated with enhanced academic performance among schoolchildren, not a surprising finding given the enrichment of these foods with brain-critical nutrients like iron, folate and vitamin B12.
Yet somehow, this message often gets lost. Sure, there are sugar- and chocolate-coated cereals which aren’t as healthy as their unsweetened, high-fibre alternatives — and it has also been argued that some of the health-promoting properties of these cereals are attributable to the nutrient content of the milk that’s taken with them. Nonetheless, in the great scheme of things, if the breakfast cereal food group in its entirety were to be placed on an imaginary “healthiness” scale of different foods, there’s little doubt that it would appear well towards the healthier end of this spectrum.
And then there’s their “displacement effect”; that happy phenomenon whereby the health-promoting effects of breakfast cereals are enhanced even beyond their own intrinsic properties, by their ability to push other high-fat, high- sugar, nutritionally poor foods out of the diet.
An important consideration is context. > For instance, we know that many children who are fussy eaters or who subsist on poor quality diets lack critical nutrients like iron, calcium, folate and vitamin D due to their low intakes of good quality red meat, fresh fruit and vegetables and fish. In this scenario, the benefit of taking a breakfast cereal with milk can help to address many of these shortfalls, enhancing the overall nutritional quality of the diet and ultimately improving health outcome and performance.
So, if you’re an exasperated parent looking for a cheap, simple, convenient and palatable way to improve your children’s diet as they head back to school this autumn, the introduction of a good quality, high-fibre breakfast cereal each morning will likely tick most of the right boxes.
* Dr Daniel McCartney is Lecturer in Human Nutrition & Dietetics at DIT.
