Sarah Todd: Why I’m ignoring the ‘experts’ and giving my children a cooked breakfast

Giving them a hearty start to the day has had surprising results in our household.

NOBODY likes a smug mother. So, for the record, this writer’s offspring have unironed shirts – well, all that shows under blazers are the collars – no name tags and odd socks.

However, since the new school year began, they have been going off to catch the school bus with a cooked breakfast inside them.

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It all started during the long summer holidays. We went away and their father, a Yorkshireman down to the moths in his wallet, insisted they “ate up” so there would be no need to spend any money on snacks between meals.

It’s a theory that worked. There was no nagging for ice creams or whinging about being tired and hungry. They swam from dawn to dusk and ate at mealtimes only.

But, the plane had barely touched down back in Blighty before they were back scavenging around the house for crisps and biscuits. What had changed?

It was the breakfast. Before they broke up in July, the teenage daughter had been getting into a bad habit of getting up late and dashing out of the house saying she had “no time” for breakfast. Now, with the bacon and eggs wafting up the stairs, she’s sitting at the table at 7.30am on the dot and wolfs it down. There’s even time for a bit of a civilised chat, rather than the usual grunting over the cereal bowls.

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“I love these breakfasts; you will keep doing them?” she says. Touch wood, they’re helping younger brother cope with the rigours of secondary school. He doesn’t seem half as tired as his sister was after the longer days. But, of course, he’s running on eggs rather than on an empty tank of some silly cereal or other. It makes me feel bad. What could they have achieved already if they’d been having a proper breakfast?

School has an electronic payment system so it’s possible for parents to see what their children have been eating. Of course, this responsible adult has never bothered to look at it before. But – after at least half a day trying to work out how to do it on the computer – the evidence is there. Powered by cereal there were snacks of Paninis, crisps and buns. All we are paying for now is lunch. The between-meal munching has gone.

It’s noticeable at the other end of the day, when they come home. A big announcement was made that we would no longer be buying crisps and that they were to have a banana or something similar when they came home. It was like living with alcoholics coming off the booze. Their father is still having withdrawal symptoms about the empty cake tin.

But the younger generation are finally starting to go to the fruit bowl without prompting.

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They are also having a big glass of milk. Well, we might as well be supporting the dairy farmers as well as the bacon and sausage producers.

It’s not all perfect. There will be blips – a box of shortbread the other hometime – but as a general observation the old-fashioned breakfasts have made a difference. Wouldn’t it be interesting if something once frowned upon by the health police could actually make a difference to the childhood obesity crisis?

It’s a subject that’s got others talking. Researchers from the University of Alabama in the United States have found that starting the morning with a fatty meal like a cooked breakfast boosts the metabolism for the rest of the day and primes the body to burn fat more efficiently. This lowers incidences of metabolic syndrome – a precursor to diabetes and heart disease.

There are plenty of statistics around about the shocking number of children who are skipping breakfast. Some suggest one in seven primary school children are struggling in class because they don’t have any breakfast.

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Don’t know how they work these things out, but there are around 820,000 youngsters missing breakfast at least once a week and almost one in four teachers have seen a child fall asleep because of hunger.

Experts say children who regularly go without breakfast before school are more likely than classmates to be inactive, unfit and obese. So, that’s an own goal for the teenage girls who miss breakfast thinking it will make them slim.

A study of 4,326 children in England, aged 10 to 16, was reported in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition and found that while 68 per cent of pupils eat before leaving home, 32 per cent do not.

Interestingly, those with the healthiest weight were always the ones who regularly had breakfast before heading to school.

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Never one for facts and figures, we’ll stick to having a cooked breakfast simply because the children seem happier, less tired and aren’t snacking between meals.

Back to not being perfect; 
their father is still on cereal – well, if he will insist on being awkward about how crispy the bacon is – and the frying pan 
gets a rest and the cereal boxes come out on a weekend. Well, even the best of chefs have the odd day off.

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