Adults Who Miss Breakfast or Morning Meal Miss Out on Essential Nutrients

Breakfast is often referred to as the most important meal of the day for daily nutrient intake is important for weight control, cardio-metabolic risk factors and cognitive performance. The most common nutrients like calcium in milk, vitamin C in fruits, and the fiber, vitamins and minerals found in fortified cereals are missed by skipping breakfast is becoming a public health concern.

A new study in Proceedings of the Nutrition Society by Ohio State University suggests that adults skipping breakfast are likely to miss out on key nutrients that are most abundant in the foods that make up morning meals.

"What we're seeing is that if you don't eat the foods that are commonly consumed at breakfast, you have a tendency not to eat them the rest of the day. So those common breakfast nutrients become a nutritional gap," said Christopher Taylor, professor of medical dietetics in the College of Medicine at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study.

The study also identified breakfast skippers consume fewer vitamins and minerals than people who eat breakfast and more differences in consuming folate, calcium, iron, and vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, C and D.

To compensate for the morning meal, they consumed a large quantity of lunch, dinner and snacks of a lower diet quality for more sugars and carbohydrates.

The dietary intake pattern represented in this study shows that extra nutrients missed at breakfast are not captured during later meals of the day.

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Source-Medindia