Most Youngsters Don't Eat Three Meals Daily - East Idaho News

Most Youngsters Don’t Eat Three Meals Daily

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By now, you know the drill that three meals a day are important for optimum health, especially when it comes to children. But since we don’t live in a perfect world, many youngsters aren’t getting three squares daily.

That’s the finding of University of Eastern Finland PhD candidate Aino-Maija Eloranta who studied the eating habits of more than 500 children between the ages of six and eight.

Only 45 percent of the boys and a third of the girls ate breakfast, lunch and dinner daily and the meal that they tended to skip the most was dinner, considered the one with the most calories and nutrients.

The study also involved measuring the youngsters’ body mass index, waist circumference, blood pressure and other important data. As it turns out, those children who ate three meals had smaller waists and were far less prone to being overweight than others who didn’t eat major meals.

However, regardless of how many meals they consumed, snacks were regularly consumed by all children, providing more than 40 percent of their daily calories in some cases.

Eloranta doesn’t completely disparage snacks although she worries that they are often high in sugar and low in important stuff like fiber.

In general, she says that parents should try to feed their kids three meals daily, which can help them to avoid obesity and heart problems later in life.


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