On Breakfast, Kids and Common Sense

Cynthia Peters

Ivy League institutions, major hospitals, and corporate money teamed up recently to make the startling revelation: kids should eat breakfast.

You may be forgiven for thinking that you already knew eating in the morning was a good idea for kids, and for having come to that conclusion based on common sense, or, perhaps, experience. But, in the future, you should leave these complex issues to the experts.

After all, experts play an important role in our lives. They remind us to doubt our own common sense, which can't be trusted, as it is not buttressed by advanced degrees and corporate funding. And they do the important job of narrowing in on tiny aspects of common sense assertions, separating them so drastically from their context that we cannot think clearly about the whole picture. Thus, we are expertly brought round full circle: desperately needing an expert to make sense of the situation.

Consider for example the recent research showing a link between school breakfast programs and improved “psychosocial” behavior in children. According to a report in the September 1998 Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, children who participate in school breakfast programs not only have less “depression, anxiety and hyperactivity,” but they show up at school more often and get better grades in math.

Whereas many of us might have accurately guessed that hunger and malnourishment make kids anxious – and might not have even needed to know that much to have been able to say simply that hunger should be remedied no matter what type of behavior it results in – we are now left to wonder, absurdly, what happened to the English and Social Studies grades? Why did they not improve along with the math? Perhaps future studies will control for which kinds of breakfast foods produce improvement in all subjects, or how much of a decrease in hunger-induced anxiety is needed to improve concentration, or what additional enticements might decrease absenteeism.

Further research, in this case, would lead us even further away from the point. And that is: if kids are hungry, they should be fed, simply because it is a human right. Not because it will improve their math scores, help them sit still, visit the nurse less often, and/or reduce tardiness. It is a sign of the mechanistic product-oriented way we view children that we think of them (and study them) as vessels receiving certain inputs (a little, a lot or no food) which then offer up certain outputs (good or bad math scores).

Ronald Kleinman, MD, chief of pediatric gastroenterology at Mass. General Hospital and a conductor of the 1998 school breakfast study, says, seemingly without irony, “This series of studies shows that those children who are consistently hungry are most likely to do poorly in school and in other aspects of their lives.”

Digging deep, the researchers made another common sense discovery: there is a stigma attached to being poor. Students were more likely to participate in school breakfast programs when the meals were offered free to all students, compared with programs that provided free meals to low-income youngsters while others paid for their breakfasts 

Provide free meals to all children, and everyone benefits, including the funders of the study – Kellogg corporation and the Mid-Atlantic Milk Marketing Association – who get an opportunity to develop brand name recognition and product loyalty in their target audience. Free breakfast programs provide cereal-makers with a direct route to children. They don't have to advertise their product, convince children to convince their parents to make a purchase, or figure out how to bypass the ethnic foods that might be the norm in multi-cultural inner-city kitchens.

In 1999, the parent corporation of Post offered free cereal in the Boston public school system. Indeed, high rates of poverty and welfare reform may mean many children are going without breakfast. But rather than support families by making it possible for them to have the time and resources to make breakfast for their kids, our policy choices direct kids instead towards sugary cereals washed down with milk. Not everyone agrees this is a step forward. State Senator from Roxbury, Dianne Wilkerson, responded, “It's crazy we should be giving urban children milk for breakfast when such a high proportion of them are children of color.”

According to the Boston Globe, “Many nonwhites are lactose intolerant, which is the inability to digest milk sugar, or lactose. If lactose is not broken apart, it ferments in the intestines, causing abdominal cramps, diarrhea, and gas. According to a review of studies on lactose intolerance by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, it affects to some degree 70 percent of African-Americans, 90 percent of Asian-Americans, 74 percent of Native Americans, and 53 percent of Mexican-Americans. Minority children make up 84 percent of the 63,000 students in Boston public schools, according to a school spokeswoman.”

Interestingly, Kellogg's' and the milk marketer's funding of the school breakfast study is reported in the media without comment, but when Project Bread – a Boston-based hunger advocacy group – sponsored a similar study in November 2000, the Boston Globe made a point of uncovering the group's “political” motivations. It turns out Project Bread supports legislation that would require schools serving low-income students to offer breakfast as a built-in part of the schedule for all students regardless of income, thus avoiding the stigma associated with being poor. Activists at Project Bread think that school breakfasts should be part of a statewide program to reduce hunger, which remarkably has not decreased despite the robust economy. 

The corporate funders' profit motives merit no mention, but the goals of an advocacy group – to reduce hunger for no other reason than hunger is bad – are suspect.

Project Bread might consider why it needs fancy studies and experts to justify breakfast for children. (Incredibly, Dr. Kleinman who also authored the 2000 study in Boston, so far knows only that breakfast “helps,” though he's not sure why. “It may simply be that breakfast helps organize the day, provides some stability. Perhaps there is a nutritional benefit. Perhaps diminishing hunger per se makes the difference.”) Project Bread might respond with a common sense (and extremely inexpert) question: “Who cares?” The newsworthy story here is that some children are hungry. Their families don't have the money, time or resources to feed them. That is an inexcusable disaster in a wealthy country like ours.

Let's get the kids some breakfast – preferably not served up by the milk marketers or the makers of Cap'n Crunch. And when everyone's had a proper meal, let's study how it came about that 1 in 5 children under the age of 12 in Massachusetts is hungry or at risk of being hungry, and how it evolved that expert talking heads are spending lots of time and resources to draw self-evident conclusions such as being consistently hungry causes anxiety. Such nonsense not only deprives children of their humanity – by seeing them as productive units who function less well when hungry – but it removes the rest of us one step further from basic common sense conclusions that require no justification, such as: hunger is unacceptable.