Psychosocial, behavioural, pedagogical, and nutritional proposals about how to encourage eating a healthy breakfast

Chiara Mameli, Erica Galli, Dario Dilillo, Alberto Alemanno, Loredana Catalani, Silvia Cau, Lucia Fransos, Fabio Lucidi, Agostino Macrì, Paolo Marconi, Alessandro Mostaccio, Giovambattista Presti, Giuseppe Rovera, Giuseppe Rotilio, Mariagrazia Rubeo, Carla Tisiot, Gianvincenzo Zuccotti

BackgroundEven if more and more evidences have highlighted the importance of breakfast in the growth and development of children, from 10 to 30% of US and European children and adolescents regularly skip breakfast. Thus, there is still a lot to be done before breakfast becomes a daily habit. The aim of this paper is to try and understand how it is possible to overcome the real or imaginary difficulties associated with skipping breakfast by psychosocial, behavioural, pedagogical and nutritional proposals.DiscussionSchools are the best context where perform healthy interventions because it is here that children learn about the importance of good health at an age when the school still plays a major role in their education. Some school interventions, based on solid theories as the Self Determination Theory and the Behaviour Analysis, have been implemented in the last years to promote health behaviour such as intake of fruit and vegetables and physical activities. Cognitive behaviour therapy is the most closely monitored type of treatment/cure for obesity in randomised controlled trials. Moreover some associations such as the National Association of Food Science Specialists have drawn an own method to encourage food education at school and promote the importance of prevention. These projects could be used as starting point to perform interventions focus on breakfast.SummaryIncrease the consumption of breakfast between children is very important. Efforts should be done to drawn new school projects based on scientific-evidences.