Do you always wake up feeling you’ve got out of bed the wrong side? Never feel good until lunchtime? Maybe fuelling up before you leave home could get your day off to a brighter start. Although there has not been a lot of research into the area of healthy breakfast and mood, it is possible to conclude from work which has been done that a low-fat, high-carbohydrate breakfast like cereal with low-fat milk and glass of banana smoothie leads to improved mood in the morning.
Such a meal has also been found to make people feel less tired, dreamy and weak than when they had a high-fat, low-carbohydrate breakfast. Finally, in tests on old people, healthy breakfast has been shown to make those studied feel calmer and less tense.
In 1997 teachers in United Kingdom set out a healthy breakfast promotion week across the country. In addition to the posters and leaflets around the school premises, they cooked toast and brewed coffee to attract the pupils’ interest. A small survey they conducted over the week showed that lots of kids are coming to school without breakfast, often because both of their parents are working and they rush to drop the children off to school so that they can get to work. They were so surprised by this that the school decided to start up a breakfast club so that children could get something to eat before school started.
Other teachers decided to make use of the pack of information in the summer over their two to three-day induction period when they welcomed new children to the school. A large proportion of children seem to come to school without eating any breakfast so they helped them to understand how important it is to try to make time for it.
Some schools in the UK have been involved for few years now with Kellogg’s National Breakfast Week and the children really enjoy it. They talk to them about why they should eat breakfast and give them individual packets of cereal to take home which they are thrilled with. Lots of children do miss breakfast, while others come in just eating a packet of crisps. By lunchtime they are really quite hungry. Those who miss breakfast will find it hard to concentrate, especially with the new literacy and numeracy hours which are being introduced, and which require the children to concentrate hard for these two hours. Without breakfast inside of them, they could find it very difficult.
Setting up a breakfast club in school can benefit children, because they would learn more, and it would benefit the school because they’d be able to concentrate more. Of course the problem is the expensive costs to set this kind of club up. Sadly the money’s just not there.



