Breakfast lowers lead levels in children ?

| April 5, 2011 | 0 Comments

father and child at breakfastDid you know that by feeding your kids breakfast each morning you can lower your child’s blood lead level? This is news to me but a new study has been completed on this topic. Researchers found that kids who ate breakfast regularly had a 15 percent lower blood levels of lead compared to children who skipped breakfast.

The Jintan Cohort Project was established in the summer of 2004 to help address some environmental concerns of lead exposure and other environmental and health-related issues. Data from the China Jintan Child Cohort Study has claimed that blood lead levels vary according to the meals taken during the day. All the information on the 1,344 children was collected and compared with children with and without breakfast in their system and the levels of lead was a key indicator. Their initial findings seem to show that if your kids eat a regular breakfast levels of B-PB (lead) are significantly lowered when compared to those who did not eat.

They hope that the findings in this study will help parents to understand how important breakfast is to your children. As kids older and seem to run late more often and want to skip breakfast but we as parents must force the issue in order to lower their lead exposure. “Parental or caregivers’ characteristics, including education and occupation, are major determinants of breakfast frequency. Consequently improving parent’s knowledge about the links between nutrition and blood lead might help to prevent lead poisoning in these children”, Dr Jianghong Liu said.

Read more about the study here: http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/39/3/668.short?rss%253D1

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