Healthy Breakfast for Children
Healthy Breakfast for Children.. At all ages, breakfast is the most important meal to start the day with. After overnight fasting, the body must replenish energy. Being the first meal of the day, it also prevents late morning cravings which encourage eating lots of anything.
And this is even more true for children because it remains an essential meal for their growth and balanced diet. In addition, it promotes concentration in class.
Having a real breakfast, every single day throughout the year, is one of the major rules of a balanced diet. When it comes to education, as always, parents are the first models and it must start early in childhood so that this good habit remains with them for life.
Breakfast ideally consists of three essential elements:
- A dairy product that provides the necessary proteins to the construction and maintenance of tissues and especially being a good source of calcium for healthy bones. If the child does not like milk, you can substitute it with plain or fruit yogurt.
- For starchy carbohydrates, which will give them energy throughout the morning, ideally bread.. From 6 years of age, you can teach children the different tastes of bread by varying baguette, country bread, multigrain bread.. If baguette is too hard, try the softer varieties.
As spread on bread, the choice is wide: Butter, jam, honey or even hazelnut chocolate spread. However, if the child wants cereal, you must turn to lower fat varieties with no added sugar because cereals already contain enough sugar.
- A whole fruit is more satiating than fruit juice but it is not always easily accepted. If it is a fruit juice, you must remember to give them the “pure fruit juice” and limit the amount to a small glass.
So, with a good filling breakfast, the child will hold perfectly until lunchtime, having consumed enough energy to stay until noon without problems. But they must also learn to recognize the signals of hunger and satiety: “I’m hungry” before eating and “I am not hungry” after eating. It is quite normal that that may feel hunger in the late morning though, it only means lunchtime is approaching.
No morning snacks at school.. According to food safety experts, snacks given to children from kindergarten appear “unjustified and does not constitute an appropriate response to the lack of breakfast”. The morning snack is even “originally a caloric excess that can only encourage the increased prevalence of obesity.”
Snack given at 10 am in the fifties to fight calcium deficiency in children was nothing more than a “milk break”.. Today, this snack is less justified because virtually no child from 4 to 12 years suffers from calcium deficiency.
In addition, the break turned into a real breakfast with products with high energy density such as cookies, cakes or chocolate bars. Too rich in sugars and fats, it only disrupts proper eating habits and increases the daily calorie intake by about 4%. At a time when childhood obesity is at an all time high around the world, nutritionists question its justification.
According to them, this snack disrupts eating patterns because it is often given in the late morning and too close to lunch. Thus, the child will have little appetite when it is time to eat. However, some justify the snack by the willingness to overcome the lack of breakfast.
According to a recent survey, 90% of kindergarten children eat breakfast before leaving. But to take into account the diversity of situations, snack should be distributed upon arrival in class between 8:30 and 9 am to those who have not eaten at home or took a very early breakfast.
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