Continued promise of school breakfast programs for improving academic outcomes : breakfast is still the most important meal of the day.

Abstract

A groundbreaking study, 1 published in this journal nearly 25 years ago, documented improved academic outcomes among low-income schoolchildren who received school breakfast via the School Breakfast Program (SBP) vs those who did not, including significantly decreased tardiness and absences and improved performance on standardized tests of academic achievement. Since that time, the empirical study of school breakfast initiatives has increased substantially, with several literature reviews 2-4 documenting the importance of breakfast for a variety of health and academic outcomes. In this issue, Anzman-Frasca and colleagues 5 at Tufts University provide even more evidence about the importance of school breakfasts. Their study used a large sample of elementary schools to examine outcomes of a Breakfast in the Classroom (BIC) intervention as a strategy to increase participation in the SBP and several key academic outcomes. They found that the BIC intervention significantly improved rates of participation in the SBP and student attendance. Although Anzman-Frasca and colleagues did not replicate previous findings that breakfast improved academic achievement, this should not be interpreted as a lack of benefit for breakfast programs. Indeed, a recent comprehensive review 2 found that 21 prior studies—many of which used highquality experimental designs to evaluate breakfast interventions—reported that consumption of breakfast can significantly improve students’ performance on standardized tests of mathematics and reading. Most important, these effects appear to be most reliable for habitual breakfast consumption, and breakfast interventions appear to require at least 1 month, but generally durations of several