Importance of breakfast in the nutritional and health improvement of the population

Abstract

Breakfast is one of the more controversial meals, considered as the most important of the day on some occasions and questioned in others. The first difficulty in analyzing the evidence of a relationship between breakfast and health is the definition of what a healthy breakfast is, based on its energy content, the frequency of its consumption and the type of food that are included in it. The breakfast of the Spanish population is improvable, since a high percentage of the child and adult Spanish population makes an insufficient breakfast or incorporates food with an inadequate nutritional profile. Scientific studies suggest that making a healthy breakfast is related to a greater intake of nutrients in the total of the day, better coverage of the nutritional recommendations and better quality of the whole diet. It is also associated with better body weight control and healthy car-diometabolic risk indicators, both in children and adults. Breakfast has also been related to improvements in attention and cognitive function in all age groups, both in acute, chronic and intervention studies, although they are very heterogeneous and it is necessary to investigate further in this line.