Breakfast Consumption and Its Associations with Health-Related Behaviors among School-Aged Adolescents: A Cross-Sectional Study in Zhejiang Province, China

Abstract

Evidence indicates that breakfast consumption is associated with a cluster of health-related behaviors, yet studies in mainland China are scarce. This study is conducted to describe the frequency of breakfast consumption among Chinese adolescents and examine its associations with other dietary, physical activity, sedentary, sleep, cigarette-smoking, and alcohol-drinking behaviors. Breakfast consumption and other health-related behaviors data was collected via a self-administered questionnaire in a cross-sectional study in Zhejiang Province, China. A total of 19,542 school-aged adolescents were recruited in this survey. The associations between breakfast consumption and other health-related behaviors were examined using logistic regression models. A significantly higher prevalence of daily breakfast consumption was found among students who were younger (p for trend <0.001), from urban schools (p < 0.001), and academic high schools (p < 0.001). More frequent vegetable and milk consumption, greater physical activity, and longer sleep duration were positively associated with daily breakfast consumption, while soft drinks and fast food consumption, computer use, cigarette-smoking and alcohol-drinking behaviors were inversely associated. The prevalence of irregular breakfast consumption was relatively high among Chinese adolescents in Zhejiang Province. Daily breakfast consumption was associated with a constellation of health-related behaviors.

High sugar-sweetened beverage intake frequency is associated with smoking, irregular meal intake and higher serum uric acid in Taiwanese adolescents

“…If frequent consumption of soda/sports drinks is added to frequent tea drink consumption, then the likelihood of smoking further increases substantially. Not eating breakfast regularly has been found to be associated with SSB intake (36)(37)(38) . This association was only found in the low frequent intake of tea and high frequent intake of soda/sports/energy drinks (LH) group in the present study.…”

Breakfast Characteristics and Their Association with Energy, Macronutrients, and Food Intake in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…Data came from three sources: 55.3% (n = 21) of them were data from National Health Surveys [6,7,22,31,33,34,[42][43][44][45]47,48,[50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57]61], 36.8% (n = 14) were original studies [12,32,[35][36][37][38][39][40][41]46,49,[58][59][60], and 7.9% (n = 3) were European multicenter studies [28][29][30]. Of the selected articles, 34.2% (n = 13) included data from children [6,7,28,33,[35][36][37]45,46,[49][50][51]…”

“…Results in Table 3 are presented in alphabetic order per author´s last name. Comparison groups according to breakfast consumption and/or type of breakfast consumed were the following: (n = 8) "frequency of consumption of RTEC" [7,[32][33][34][35]39,46,49], (n = 7) "RTEC consumers vs. non-RTEC consumers" [30,36,41,45,47,54,55,59], (n = 5) "breakfast Skippers vs. breakfast consumers vs. RTEC consumers" [44,48,51,53,56], (n = 12) "frequency of breakfast consumption (breakfast skippers vs. breakfast consumers)" [22,29,31,38,42,43,50,55,57,58,60,61], (n = 3) comparisons between different types of breakfast [6,28,52], (n = 3) comparisons between nutritional composition of breakfast [12,37,41], and one of them compared depending on the breakfast quality (n = 1) [40]. Two studies had two comparison groups according to breakfast consumption [41,55].…”

Growing up strong: The importance of physical, mental, and emotional strength during childhood and adolescence with focus on dietary factors

“…Several observational studies exist that examine the relationship between the frequency of breakfast consumption and physical strength. Greater breakfast consumption was associated with increased physical strength as assessed through grip strength (Arora et al 2012, Wang et al 2016, Cui et al 2018. While these associative findings do not provide a causal effect of breakfast on physical strength, they do establish preliminary support for examining this relationship in future intervention-based studies.…”