It’s amazing: Breakfast can improve your memory, help you concentrate, and help you to maintain a healthy weight — and it tastes good, too!

Feed your brain

Breakfast replenishes the fuel that your body uses up while you sleep — it is, as its name betrays, a break from an overnight fast.

Your brain doesn’t have a storage place for fuel, so it’s particularly affected by a lack of food. If glucose, your brain’s fuel source, isn’t refilled after a night’s sleep, your brain can’t function at an optimal level. It’s like running a car on empty.

It’s not just a theory. According to one study, people who didn’t eat breakfast had a decreased ability to remember items from a word list or a story compared with people who ate breakfast. While these may seem like minor tasks, the ability to remember is key to performing well at home, work, or school. Other important brain functions, such as the ability to pay attention and to concentrate, have also been shown to improve with eating breakfast.

Maintain a healthy weight

Research has taught us that people who eat breakfast have a higher-quality diet and are better able to control their weight than people who skip the meal. In fact, 78% of the people listed in the National Weight Control Registry, a database of individuals who successfully lost at least 10% of their body weight and kept it off for at least one year, report eating breakfast every day. In addition, studies show that breakfast eaters are less likely to be obese than their meal-skipping counterparts.

Learn More

Find ways to make breakfast a habit and get great breakfast ideas.