The Nutrition Of Breakfast Foods

Nutrient-rich breakfast foods can get your day started off in a healthy manner. Both adults and children need to eat breakfast, as the Dietary Guidelines for Americans states that a lack of breakfast may contribute to obesity in all age groups. When you eat breakfast, you increase your metabolism and give your body fuel through food first thing in the morning, which gives you energy to perform your daily activities.

Benefits of Breakfast

Eating a nutritious breakfast early in the morning may help you eat fewer calories throughout the remainder of the day, as evidenced by a study published in January 2004 in the "Journal of Nutrition." The study found that eating a morning meal helps satisfy hunger and makes you less likely to overeat during the day. If you eat a satisfying breakfast, you may find yourself able to omit a morning snack and wait until it is time to eat a filling, nutritious lunch. Eating breakfast also makes fitting in your daily fruit, vegetable, protein, grains, dairy and oil requirements easier.

Grains

Using whole-grains as the basis of your breakfast meals can help you eat more complex carbohydrates during the day, and possibly lower your cholesterol levels. Cooked oats give you 159 calories per cup and 4 g of fiber, if prepared with water. The oats contain only 1 g of sugar and 13.95 mg of iron. A 3/4 cup of bran flakes has 96 calories, 2.82 g of protein and 5.3 g of fiber, helping you meet your 25 g per day fiber requirement, if you are a woman and 38 g per day, if you are a man. One-half cup of skim milk added to either cereal adds trace amounts of fat, 252 mg of calcium and 43 calories. Other nutritious whole-grain breakfast choices include whole-grain toast, grits, whole-wheat pancakes, polenta or shredded cereals.

Protein-Based Breakfast Foods

Eating a protein-rich breakfast in the morning can give you energy, a feeling of fullness and help you meet your 46 g per day protein requirement for women, and 56 g per day requirement for men. Easy, healthy protein-based breakfast foods include eggs or egg whites, soy sausage or soy bacon, beans, nut butters, dairy products and turkey bacon. Eggs have 6.28 g of protein, 72 calories and 28 mg of calcium, while 1 tbsp. of almond butter has 98 calories, 1.6 g of fiber and 3.35 g of protein. Eat the eggs alone, or alongside toast or cereal. Spread the almond butter on whole-wheat toast. One-half cup of fat-free refined beans, which you can include in a breakfast wrap, has 91 calories, 6.17 g of protein and 5.4 g of protein. Turkey bacon has 107 calories, 8.29 g of protein and no fiber in a 1-oz. serving.

Considerations

Adding fruits, vegetables and yogurt to both grain and protein-based breakfast meals increases the nutrients you eat each morning. You can use the labels on yogurt to find one that has 13 g of protein per ounce, no added sugars and only 127 calories. The yogurt has 452 mg of calcium. If you add fruit to cereal or yogurt, use whole fruit or fruit canned in fruit juice rather than fruit canned in sugar-syrup. Make omelets healthier by adding 1/2 cup of chopped broccoli which only has 15 calories, but 39 mg of vitamin C and 28 micrograms of folate.