Regularly eating cereal for breakfast is tied to healthy weight for kids, according to a new study that endorses making breakfast cereal accessible to low-income kids to help fight childhood obesity. "(Cereal) is an excellent breakfast choice, it's simple, and gets those essential nutrients that children need, especially low income minority children," who tend to be hit hardest by childhood obesity and related health problems, said Frantzen, who is employed by Dairy MAX, a regional dairy council in Grand Prairie, Texas. Previous studies have linked eating breakfast with maintaining a lower body mass index (BMI) over time. The new study looked at the role that breakfast, specifically cereal, plays in both weight and nutrition among low-income kids. Lead author Lana Frantzen and her coauthors interviewed 625 schoolchildren as they progressed from fourth to sixth grades in San Antonio. Once a year they asked the children to remember what they had had to eat over the previous three days and calculated their BMI, a measure of weight relative to height. As fourth graders, 64 percent of the kids said they'd eaten breakfast on each of the last three days, compared to 42 percent by the time they were sixth graders. With data for three days per year for three years in a row, the researchers ended up with nine days of breakfast analysis for each child. Kids who ate cereal four out of the nine days tended to be in the 95th percentile for BMI, which is considered overweight, compared to kids who ate cereal all nine days, whose measurements were in the 65th percentile, in the healthy weight range. Thirty-two percent of fourth graders did not eat breakfast at all, 25 percent had something other than cereal and about 43 percent had cereal. Cereals, were the most common breakfast items. Children who didn't eat cereal but did have breakfast reported having foods ranging from scrambled eggs, white bread and sausage to granola bars, tortillas and breakfast tacos. Only 70 kids had cereal on every one of the three days, but for each time they had cereal, their intake of certain nutrients was higher than that of other kids, Frantzen's group reports in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Kids who ate more cereal got more vitamin D, B-3, B-12, riboflavin, calcium, iron, zinc and potassium in their diets than kids who ate less cereal or none at all. They also got slightly more calories, fat, fiber and sugar. Cereals are fortified with a variety of vitamins and minerals, and the milk that usually comes with cereals is a good source of calcium, potassium and vitamin D, Frantzen said.
