IT’S BEEN long said that ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the day.’ And there are many clichés ’Go to work on an egg’ and ’breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper.’ All good advice, but it seems we might be eating like a king all too often.
As a nation, we’re having too much of what we fancy not only at breakfast but at every meal - making bad choices about the food we eat. A high fat, high calorie and high sugar diet is making us sick. I’m not suggesting we abandon the great Scottish breakfast or ditch the black pudding, haggis or Lorne sausage, but when it comes to what our kids are eating there’s definitely room for improvement. According to Food Standards Scotland half of all the sugar we eat comes from treats like biscuits, cakes and sugary drinks. A quarter of Scots think it’s okay to reward children with chocolates, sweets and biscuits. There’s no hiding from the evidence - the Food Standards Agency report, The Scottish Diet: It Needs to Change, published in 2015 also showed 32% of P1 children had obvious dental decay and around one-third of Scottish children are overweight or obese. Recent healthy eating campaigns reveal nothing has changed.
Regardless of what we think, breakfast is an important start to our day, particularly for school children; and with that in mind I recently joined P6 and P7 pupils at Alexandra Parade Primary School in Glasgow’s East End to get the inside story on how they were starting their day. The school was taking part in the launch of Scotland’s Food for Thought 30 day ‘Healthy Breakfast Challenge’ - a new initiative aimed at educating kids about the importance of eating a healthy breakfast.