(Press-News.org) COLUMBUS, Ohio - Adults who skip breakfast are likely to miss out on key nutrients that are most abundant in the foods that make up morning meals, a new study suggests.
An analysis of data on more than 30,000 American adults showed that skipping breakfast - and missing out on the calcium in milk, vitamin C in fruit, and the fiber, vitamins and minerals found in fortified cereals - likely left adults low on those nutrients for the entire day.
"What we're seeing is that if you don't eat the foods that are commonly consumed at breakfast, you have a tendency not to eat them the rest of the day. So those common breakfast nutrients become a nutritional gap," said Christopher Taylor, professor of medical dietetics in the College of Medicine at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's latest dietary guidelines, calcium, potassium, fiber and vitamin D are considered "dietary components of public health concern" for the general U.S. population - with iron added for pregnant women - because shortages of those nutrients are associated with health problems.
Most research related to breakfast has focused on the effects of the missed morning meal on children in school, which includes difficulty focusing and behavioral problems.
"With adults, it's more like, 'You know how important breakfast is.' But now we see what the implications really are if they miss breakfast," Taylor said.
He completed the study with Ohio State School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences graduate students Stephanie Fanelli and Christopher Walls. The research, which was supported by a regional dairy association, is published online in Proceedings of the Nutrition Society.
The team used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which collects health information on a nationally representative sample of about 5,000 people every year through interviews, laboratory tests and physical exams.
The sample for this study included 30,889 adults age 19 and older who had participated in the survey between 2005 and 2016. The Ohio State researchers analyzed data from 24-hour dietary recalls participants completed as part of the NHANES survey.
"During the recall, participants self-designate their eating occasions as a meal or a snack, and they tell you at what point in time they ate whatever food they report," said Fanelli, first author of the study. "That's how we determined whether someone was a breakfast eater or a breakfast skipper."
In this sample, 15.2% of participants, or 4,924 adults, had reported skipping breakfast.
The researchers translated the food data into nutrient estimates and MyPlate equivalents using the federal Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies and daily dietary guidelines, and then compared those estimates to recommended nutrient intakes established by the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academies.
On several key recommendations measured, from fiber and magnesium to copper and zinc, breakfast skippers had taken in fewer vitamins and minerals than people who had eaten breakfast. The differences were most pronounced for folate, calcium, iron, and vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, C and D.
"We found those who skipped breakfast were significantly more likely not to meet the bottom threshold of what we hope to see people eat," Fanelli said.
Compared to the Healthy Eating Index-2015, which assesses how well a set of foods aligns with federal recommendations, breakfast skippers also had an overall lower-quality diet than those who ate breakfast.
For example, breakfast skippers were more likely than those who noshed in the morning to eat more added sugars, carbohydrates and total fat over the course of the day - in part because of higher levels of snacking.
"Snacking is basically contributing a meal's worth of calorie intakes for people who skipped breakfast," Taylor said. "People who ate breakfast ate more total calories than people who didn't eat breakfast, but the lunch, dinner and snacks were much larger for people who skipped breakfast, and tended to be of a lower diet quality."
While the data represent a single day in each participant's life, the huge sample provides a "nationally representative snapshot for the day," Taylor said.
"It shows that those who skipped breakfast had one nutrient profile and those who ate breakfast had a different nutrient profile," he said. "It helps us identify on any given day that this percentage of people are more likely to be skipping breakfast. And on that day, their dietary intake pattern showed that their consumption didn't capture those extra nutrients that they have basically missed at breakfast."
INFORMATION:
This work was supported by the National Dairy Association Mideast.
Contacts:
Christopher Taylor, chris.taylor@osumc.edu
Stephanie Fanelli, fanelli.18@buckeyemail.osu.edu
Written by Emily Caldwell, Caldwell.151@osu.edu
State-of-the-art video microscopy has enabled researchers at WEHI, Australia, to see the molecular details of how malaria parasites invade red blood cells - a key step in the disease.
The researchers used a custom-built lattice light sheet microscope - the first in Australia - to capture high-resolution videos of individual parasites invading red blood cells, and visualise the molecular and cellular changes that occur throughout this process. The research has provided critical new information about malaria parasite biology that may have applications for the development of much-needed new antimalarial medicines.
The research, which was published today in Nature Communications, was led by Ms Cindy Evelyn, Dr Niall Geoghegan, Dr Lachlan Whitehead, ...
Makeup wearers may be absorbing and ingesting potentially toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), according to a new study published today in Environmental Science & Technology Letters. The researchers found high fluorine levels--indicating the probable presence of PFAS--in most waterproof mascara, liquid lipsticks, and foundations tested. Some of the products with the highest fluorine levels underwent further analysis and were all confirmed to contain at least four PFAS of concern. The majority of products with high fluorine, including those ...
Many cosmetics sold in the United States and Canada likely contain high levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a potentially toxic class of chemicals linked to a number of serious health conditions, according to new research from the University of Notre Dame.
Scientists tested more than 200 cosmetics including concealers, foundations, eye and eyebrow products and various lip products. According to the study, 56 percent of foundations and eye products, 48 percent of lip products and 47 percent of mascaras tested were found to contain high levels of fluorine, which is an indicator of PFAS use in ...
WASHINGTON (June 15, 2021)--Malicious COVID-19 online content -- including racist content, disinformation and misinformation -- thrives and spreads online by bypassing the moderation efforts of individual social media platforms, according to new research published in the journal END ...
More than 50 species of tree snail in the South Pacific Society Islands were wiped out following the introduction of an alien predatory snail in the 1970s, but the white-shelled Partula hyalina survived.
Now, thanks to a collaboration between University of Michigan biologists and engineers with the world's smallest computer, scientists understand why: P. hyalina can tolerate more sunlight than its predator, so it was able to persist in sunlit forest edge habitats.
"We were able to get data that nobody had been able to obtain," said David Blaauw, the Kensall D. Wise Collegiate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "And ...
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (JUNE 15, 2021). In this longitudinal study, researchers from Wake Forest School of Medicine and the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, Texas, examined the frequency and severity of head impacts experienced by youth football players and how exposure to head impacts changes from one year to the next in returning players. The researchers then compared the resulting data with findings on neuroimaging studies obtained over consecutive years in the same athletes. The comparison demonstrated a significant positive association between changes in head impact exposure (HIE) metrics and changes in abnormal findings on brain imaging studies. ...
A new therapy prompts immune defense cells to swallow misshapen proteins, amyloid beta plaques and tau tangles, whose buildup is known to kill nearby brain cells as part of Alzheimer's disease, a new study shows.
Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the investigation showed that elderly monkeys had up to 59 percent fewer plaque deposits in their brains after treatment with CpG oligodeoxynucleotides (CpG ODN), compared with untreated animals. These amyloid beta plaques are protein fragments that clump together and clog the junctions between nerve cells (neurons).
Brains of treated animals also had a ...
When young adults are more interested in socializing and casually dating, they tend to drink more alcohol, according to a new paper led by a Washington State University professor.
On the other hand, scientists found that when young adults are in serious relationships, are not interested in dating or place less importance on friendship, their alcohol use was significantly lower.
Published June 15 in the journal Substance Use & Misuse, the study included more than 700 people in the Seattle area aged 18-25 who filled out surveys every month for two years. The study used a community sample that was not limited to college students.
"Young adults shift so much in terms of social relationships ...
Nearly one in four teachers may leave their job by the end of the current (2020-'21) school year, compared with one in six who were likely to leave prior to the pandemic, according to a new RAND Corporation survey. Teachers who identified as Black or African American were particularly likely to consider leaving.
U.S. public-school teachers surveyed in January and February 2021 reported they are almost twice as likely to experience frequent job-related stress as the general employed adult population and almost three times as likely to experience depressive symptoms as the general adult population.
These results suggest potential immediate and long-term threats to the teacher supply.
"Teacher stress was a concern prior ...
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - June 15, 2021 - With preseason football training on the horizon, a new study shows that head impacts experienced during practice are associated with changes in brain imaging of young players over multiple seasons.
The research, conducted by scientists at Wake Forest School of Medicine and the University of Texas Southwestern, is published in the June 15 issue of the Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics.
"Although we need more studies to fully understand what the measured changes mean, from a public health perspective, it is motivation to further reduce head impact drills used during practice in youth football," said the study's corresponding author Jill Urban, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Wake Forest ...
