Eating breakfast in the morning is always something most students seem to skip, but do you know how impactful skipping out on these meals can be? Breakfast is vital for students’ mental and physical growth, so what’s keeping them from nourishing their bodies?
Breakfast provides students with the start and boost of an earlier morning; without it, they lack the charge to positively influence their school day. This topic is significantly important to the students at Capital High School because a large portion of the student pool takes rigorous and hefty IB and Honors classes. Additionally, students who opt to start their day earlier than their first period, choosing zero hour, need breakfast to fuel them for the hours they have left. Regardless of whether you take complex classes, an individual’s spending six hours a day processing daily information needs breakfast to keep them generated and energized for course work. The school needs lively humans, not lethargic zombies! What keeps students from getting their nutritional boost of the day? And why is it so difficult to incorporate a healthy breakfast for young students? As most of the world knows, students are selective eaters.
Food doesn’t have much appeal when you stay up catching up on homework, tired from extracurriculars, or even staying up to do the things and activities you want because you don’t have time during the day. Sometimes we value our sleep over waking up in time to catch a healthy morning meal. The main factor, however, is that breakfast is a commotion and a task that Capital High School students don’t find appealing or worth sacrificing their sleep for.
There are also other factors, such as not starving in the morning, body and weight fear, and the fact that the breakfast food served doesn’t fit their taste buds. One student said that “they’re not much of a breakfast person.” Traditional breakfast might not cut it! However, there are ways to get around that common problem. Students need breakfast regardless of whether their judgment says otherwise, and while the problem has not been an easy issue to fix in young teens, one way we can get students to eat breakfast is to provide better options and transparency towards the importance of fueling their bodies.
The health of our students will always be prioritized because, without a stable and poised brain, school will find an absence of happiness and enjoyment, which will always be more vital than test scores or participation. Universally, there’s a deficiency of understanding about how impactful eating breakfast is on student bodies. Most students don’t know that eating in the morning increases your energy and ability to concentrate. First, you don’t have to worry about your stomach communicating its hunger, but your attentiveness isn’t infrequent. “ No, I didn’t” Zeke Lander stated when I informed him of the internal benefits a good morning meal can do for you. Landers says that he might incorporate breakfast in the morning. While that’s a neutral answer, it’s a step in the right direction because he received information on the benefits of a proper morning meal. “I don’t have time,” Meredith Morgan, a CHS full-IB student, states.
The problem is that students should not be sacrificing two health factors so they can get the full amount of one. That’s either sleep or eating. Students should be getting the optimal amount of both. How can we work towards getting more time for both? School should administer a better work-life balance, especially for students like Morgan, who have an early start to the day and a late-night schedule. “Not all the time,” Landers stated when I asked if he had time for breakfast in the morning.
This serves as a sufficient reason why work and balance should coexist, not repel each other. Students like Landers and Morgan from CHS find that their school atmosphere does not provide them with a rhythm and schedule that considers both sleep and eating in the morning. “If we don’t get enough sleep to keep your body’s engine humming, you’ll start to throw your appetite hormones out of whack. Sleep is not a luxury” (Koff). Explaining the reason why CHS students don’t obtain an appetite during school mornings. Breakfast improves student performance and helps them deal with the adversity school might provide. We need more students eating in the mornings, or else school will conclude that there is a deficiency of attentiveness! Eating, sleeping, and finding time for students’ aspirations and joys should not be a bargain. How will school administrators and high schools work towards fixing this crucial problem for the growth of our generation?