Breakfast cereal tied to lower BMI for kids

April 11—Regularly eating cereal for breakfast is tied to healthy weight for kids, according to a new study that endorses making breakfast cereal accessible to low-income kids to help fight childhood obesity.

One in every four American children lives in a food insecure household where breakfast isn't a sure thing, lead author Dr. Lana Frantzen told Reuters Health.

Frantzen and her coauthors interviewed 625 schoolchildren as they progressed from fourth to sixth grades in San Antonio. Once a year they asked the children to remember what they had eaten the previous three days and calculated their BMI, a measure of weight relative to height.

Kids who ate cereal four out of the nine days tended to be in the 95th percentile for BMI, which is considered overweight, compared to kids who ate cereal all nine days, whose measurements were in the 65th percentile, in the healthy weight range.