A good breakfast is important to start the day off right. But sometimes we skip breakfast when we’re on the way to school or work. A new study of more than 150,000 schoolchildren in 42 countries found that children who eat breakfast every day are happier with their lives.
Is the frequency of breakfast consumption associated with life satisfaction in children and adolescents? A cross-sectional study with 154,151 participants from 42 countries | Nutrition Journal | Full text
https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12937-024-00979-5 
Children who skip breakfast are less happy in life – ARU
https://www.aru.ac.uk/news/children-who-miss-breakfast-are-less-happy-in-life
Children who eat breakfast every day have something in common: ScienceAlert
https://www.sciencealert.com/kids-who-eat-breakfast-every-day-share-something-in-common
Previous studies have linked eating a nutritious breakfast to positive outcomes such as improved memory, improved cognitive function and increased physical activity, while skipping breakfast has been linked to increased depression, stress and psychological distress in people of all ages.
However, the relationship between breakfast frequency and life satisfaction in children has not yet been sufficiently researched. Therefore, an international team of researchers from Ecuador, Brazil, the UK and other countries conducted a study on the relationship between breakfast habits and life satisfaction.
The data used in the study
were collected as part of the HBSC (Health Behavior in School-Aged Children) study, a study conducted in 42 countries, mainly in Europe, and aimed at school children aged 10 to 17. The survey was conducted from 2017 to 2018 and 155,451 children (51.3% girls) answered questions about how often they eat breakfast and how satisfied they are with their lives.
The researchers found that children who ate breakfast more frequently per week were more likely to have high life satisfaction, even when factors such as gender, age, socioeconomic status, fruit and vegetable consumption, consumption of sweets, frequency of shared family meals, physical activity and body mass index (BMI) were taken into account.
Below is a graph the research team created. The horizontal axis represents “days eaten breakfast” and the vertical axis represents “self-rated life satisfaction on a scale of 0 to 10.” The more days eaten breakfast, the higher life satisfaction tends to be. Children who don’t eat breakfast once have an average life satisfaction of “5.8,” while children who eat breakfast every day have an average life satisfaction of “6.4.”
In addition, the graph below shows the life satisfaction of “children who did not eat breakfast once a day” in each country included in the HBSC in purple and the life satisfaction of “children who ate breakfast every day” in orange. Although the numbers vary from country to country, it is evident that “children who ate breakfast every day” have higher life satisfaction in each country. The children with the lowest life satisfaction were “children who did not eat breakfast once a day” and lived in Romania, and the children with the highest life satisfaction were “children who ate breakfast every day” and lived in Portugal.
Since this study only examined correlations, it is unclear whether eating breakfast directly leads to higher life satisfaction. a study A study conducted in South Korea found that eating breakfast also relieves physical symptoms such as fatigue, sleep disturbances, nausea, headaches and fever.
professor Daniela Schmidt from Anglia Ruskin University, Co-author of the study, argues that not only does eating breakfast provide the energy and nutrients needed for cognitive tasks, but the vitamins and minerals consumed at breakfast, as well as the breakfast routine, can also contribute to improving life satisfaction. “We found that in all the countries studied, people who eat breakfast every day report higher overall life satisfaction than those who do not eat breakfast at all,” he said.
