Do you wake up wondering what to eat for breakfast? It’s an important question about an important meal. The word itself tells you why: Breakfast breaks, or ends, a fast. This fast is the period of not eating that happens while you sleep.
“Young people—teenagers especially—like to sleep for longer,” says Louise Dye, a professor of nutrition and behavior at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. “Their energy stores will get used during the night,” she says. To refill those energy stores, Dye recommends starting the day with a meal like cereal and milk or toast and yogurt—foods that provide a slow release of energy.
Dye and her former student Katie Adolphus spent years researching how breakfast affects children’s performance in school. In one experiment, they found that kids who ate cereal and milk did better on tests of reaction time, attention, and memory than kids who had no breakfast.
“Both memory and attention are really important for your lessons and how you perform at school,” Adolphus says. “That translates over time to a beneficial effect on school grades.” It’s one of the reasons many schools offer free breakfast programs.
Breakfast is also important for health, Dye adds. Breakfast eaters are more likely to get the vitamins and minerals they need each day. Calcium from milk and other dairy products helps kids build strong bones. And did we mention breakfast is delicious?