THE claim that breakfast is the most important meal of the day has been repeated so often and with such conviction that most people have simply stopped questioning it.
It sits alongside other unimpeachable morning wisdoms: drink a glass of water, get some sunlight, and for goodness' sake eat something before you leave the house.
But does eating breakfast actually help you concentrate better at work or school?
Verdict:
TRUE, BUT
Eating breakfast does genuinely support attention, memory and the ability to think clearly, and skipping it regularly appears to make all three measurably worse, particularly for children and adolescents whose brains are still developing.
The mechanism is not that complicated.
The brain runs almost exclusively on glucose, and after a night of sleep it has gone without fuel for anywhere between eight and twelve hours.
Breakfast restores blood glucose levels, giving the brain the energy it needs to focus, process information and retrieve memories during the hours that matter most for learning and work.
A systematic review published in Advances in Nutrition, which examined 45 studies on breakfast and cognitive performance in children and adolescents, found that eating breakfast had short-term positive effects on attention, executive function and memory compared to going without.
The effects were particularly consistent for tasks requiring sustained attention, the kind that Malaysian schoolchildren need to follow a lesson, take notes and actually retain what they have been taught.
The Malaysia-specific data makes for sobering reading.
A 2024 study on Malaysian primary school children from the South East Asian Nutrition Surveys II, published in Appetite, found that more than one in three Malaysian children, precisely 36%, skip breakfast at least once a week, with those who skip consuming lower intakes of energy and key nutrients including calcium and iron.
The problem does not improve much when those children grow up and go to university.
A 2025 study by researchers at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, found that 67.3% of Malaysian university students regularly skip breakfast, and that breakfast skipping was associated with impaired cognitive function and lower academic performance.
That is more than two in three students starting their lectures running on empty.
A 2024 study published in PMC, which assessed morning attention among health professional students, found that those who ate a more nutritious breakfast showed significantly better concentration during morning classes, with a measurable positive association between breakfast quality and attentiveness.
Now for the BUT, because your nasi lemak loyalty deserves an honest assessment.
The evidence is considerably stronger for children than for adults, and what you eat for breakfast matters almost as much as whether you eat at all.
A breakfast of refined carbohydrates and sugar, the kind that sends blood glucose spiking and then crashing within an hour, may offer a brief window of alertness followed by the kind of mid-morning fog that has derailed many a 10am meeting.
Protein, fibre and complex carbohydrates tend to deliver more sustained cognitive support because they release energy more slowly and keep blood glucose stable for longer.
Eggs, oats, whole grain bread and fruit score better on this front than the average school canteen option of white bread with kaya and a packet of Milo.
Your parents were right about eating breakfast.
They may have been slightly off on what counts as a good one.
Sources:
1. https://advances.nutrition.
2. https://doi.org/10.1177/
3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.
4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
