You probably won't be surprised that what your mother and grandmother have been telling you for years is true: Eating a good breakfast is important. A new study, that spanned five years, and involved 2216 adolescents, has found that a healthy breakfast decreases the urge to indulge in unhealthy snacks and junk food before lunchtime rolls around; and in fact, teens that eat a good breakfast are less prone than their breakfast-skipping friends to be overweight.

It is estimated that up to 34 percent of children and teens routinely skip breakfast. During the last twenty years the number of children in the United States that are overweight has doubled, and for teens that number has tripled. Those teens do who skip breakfast, the study found, run a higher risk for being overweight than their breakfast-eating friends. The study found that teenaged girls were more prone to skip breakfast than teenaged boys; and that breakfast eating frequency declines throughout adolescence. This study is a wake-up call to parents, since clearly more than a third of U.S. teens are either overweight, or close enough to being overweight to be at risk.

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