Breakfast habits, nutritional status, body weight, and academic performance in children and adolescents.

Breakfast has been labeled the most important meal of the day, but are there data to support this claim? We summarized the results of 47 studies examining the association of breakfast consumption with nutritional adequacy (nine studies), body weight (16 studies), and academic performance (22 studies) in children and adolescents. Breakfast skipping is highly prevalent in the United States and Europe (10% to 30%), depending on age group, population, and definition. Although the quality of breakfast was variable within and between studies, children who reported eating breakfast on a consistent basis tended to have superior nutritional profiles than their breakfast-skipping peers.