• Breakfast gives you energy for the rest of the day.
• Eating breakfast improves the total daily nutrient intake.
• A recent study found that teens who ate breakfast ate more protein and carbohydrates but less fat than breakfast skippers.
  

Improve ability to concentrate:

• Breakfast helps you think well and do physical activities better.
• Students who eat breakfast have shown greater improvements in standardized test scores.
• Students who eat breakfast are more alert and shown increased ability to concentrate in class.

Help keep a healthy body weight:

• Breakfast helps to keep you from snacking during the morning.
• Breakfast helps to keep you from overeating at other meals; skipping meals sets up extreme hunger patterns later in the day, resulting in excess calorie intake.
• Breakfast is the most important meal of the day and the foundation of healthy eating habits.

Now that you know how important breakfast is, how can you get involved and encourage our friends and peers to eat breakfast? Here are some things you can do:

Many of our schools provide a school breakfast program. Since we spend so much of our time at school, it would be easy for us to eat breakfast at school. Click here to find out if your school offers a breakfast program. If your school does not offer a school breakfast program, you can talk to your principle and teachers to find out why. Share with them how important breakfast is and encourage them to have a school breakfast program. You can direct them to this website and they can find out for themselves the importance of breakfast.

Talk to your parents and family about the importance of breakfast. You and your family can make a plan to eat breakfast.

Talk to the student body government about breakfast foods available at your school. If you have vending machines or student store at your school, find out what food items are being sold. If you have a school breakfast program at school, find out who’s actually eating at school. You and other students at school may write letters, talk to principles, or go to school board meetings to express your thoughts and ideas about making sure students are eating healthy breakfast at your school.

If you don’t have time in the morning to prepare breakfast or if your school does not have a breakfast program, you can try getting your breakfast ready the night before. You can have easy, quick breakfast by having dry cereal, instant oatmeal, or fruit in a basket or cupboard in your kitchen. You can also have yogurt, milk, hard-boiled eggs in your refrigerator. If you’re not hungry first thing in the morning, prepare a snack to eat later in the morning.

Do you want to get involved? Here are more ideas for you and your friends!

Do you want to find out what your friends and others at your school think about school breakfast? You can download the survey and directions here.

Tell us what you think! Submit your ideas!

You can click here to submit your thoughts and ideas. They can be anything from how to encourage other teens to eat breakfast to what you think your school can do to promote breakfast. We would love to hear from you!