Adults who skip breakfast likely to miss out on nutrients: Study

Adults who skip breakfast are likely to miss out on important nutrients most commonly found in the foods that make up morning meals, suggests a study from Ohio State University.

The study was published online in the journal Proceedings of the Nutrition Society.

Analysis of data from more than 30,000 American adults showed that skipping breakfast – and missing the calcium in milk, vitamin C in fruit, and the fiber, vitamins, and minerals found in fortified cereals – in adults likely to be deficient in these nutrients for the whole day.

“What we see is that if you don’t eat the foods that are normally consumed for breakfast, you have a tendency not to eat them for the rest of the day. So those common breakfast nutrients are becoming a nutritional gap, ”said Christopher Taylor, professor of medical dietetics at Ohio State University’s College of Medicine and lead author on the study.

According to the latest US Department of Agriculture nutritional guidelines, calcium, potassium, fiber and vitamin D are considered “nutritional elements of public health” – iron added for pregnant women – for the general US population because these nutrients are scarce associated with health problems.

Most of the research on breakfast has focused on the effects of missed morning meals on children at school, which include difficulty concentrating and behavior problems.

“With adults, it’s more like, ‘You know how important breakfast is.’ But now let’s see what the real effects of missing breakfast are, “said Taylor.

He graduated from Ohio State School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences graduates Stephanie Fanelli and Christopher Walls. The research supported by a regional dairy association.

The team used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which collects health information on a nationwide representative sample of approximately 5,000 people through interviews, laboratory tests, and physical exams.

The sample for this study included 30,889 adults aged 19 years and older who participated in the survey between 2005 and 2016. Ohio state researchers analyzed data from 24-hour reminder callbacks conducted as part of the NHANES survey.

“During the recall, participants refer to their eating spots themselves as a meal or snack and tell you when they ate the food they report,” said Fanelli, lead author of the study. “This is how we determined whether someone is a breakfast eater or a breakfast skipper.”

In this sample, 15.2 percent of participants, or 4,924 adults, said they skipped breakfast.

Researchers translated the food data into nutrient estimates and MyPlate equivalents using the Federal Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies and the Daily Dietary Guidelines, and then compared these estimates to the recommended nutrient intake set by the National Academies’ Food and Nutrition Board.

According to several key recommendations measured, from fiber and magnesium to copper and zinc, breakfast skippers consumed fewer vitamins and minerals than people who had breakfast. The differences were most pronounced for folate, calcium, iron and vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, C and D.

“We found that those who skipped breakfast were significantly more likely to not hit the lower threshold of what we hope people will eat,” Fanelli said.

Compared to the 2015 Healthy Eating Index, which rates how well a number of foods match federal recommendations, breakfast skippers also had an overall inferior diet than those who ate breakfast.

For example, breakfast skippers were more likely to consume more added sugar, carbohydrates, and total fat during the day than those who ate in the morning – in part because of the higher proportion of snacks.

“Snacks basically add to the caloric intake of a meal when people skip breakfast,” Taylor said. “People who ate breakfast ate more calories overall than people who didn’t, but lunch, dinner, and snacks were much larger for those who skipped breakfast and tended to be of lower nutritional quality.”

While the data represents a single day in each participant’s life, the huge sample provides a “nationally representative snapshot of the day,” said Taylor.

“It shows that those who skipped breakfast had one nutritional profile and those who had breakfast had a different nutritional profile,” he said.

He added, “Every day it helps us to see that this percentage of people are more likely to skip breakfast. And that day, their eating patterns showed that their consumption did not capture the extra nutrients they were essentially missing “at breakfast.”

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source https://dailyhealthynews.ca/adults-who-skip-breakfast-likely-to-miss-out-on-nutrients-study/