2006年NPR美国国家公共电台九月-A Better Breakfast Can Boost a Child's Br

I’m Allison Aubrey. When it comes to the brain and nutrition, there’s lots of evidence to suggest that eating breakfast really can help kids succeed in the classroom. The reason is pretty straightforward 1. After a fasting all night, developing brains need a fresh supply of glucose 2 or blood sugar.

Without glucose, our brain doesn’t operate very well, and people have difficulty understanding new information. They have difficulty with visual, spatial 3, er, understanding and they don’t remember things as well.

Terrill Bravender is professor of pediatrics at Duke University. He says dozens of studies going back to the 1950s have consistently shown that those children who eat breakfast, any breakfast, do better than those who don’t. In one study, of 4,000 elementary school students, researchers gave half of the kids a morning meal and directed the other half to skip it. All of the children then took a battery of attention tests, Harvard psychologist Michael Murphy who directed the study says to measure, for instance, short-term memory, they used a digit 4 span test.

We read a series of digits 5 out loud, 5, 6, 2 and asked them to repeat them and we would read them longer and longer spans of digits and the total score, you get the number of digits you are able to repeat correctly.

They also tested things such as verbal fluency 6. They asked children to name all the animals they could think of in 60 seconds. Across the board, Murphy says the breakfast-eaters performed better. So with the preponderance of evidence suggesting that breakfast really is key, then next question becomes: Does it matter what kinds of foods kids eat? Duke’s Terrill Bravender says one thing he’d never served his children is Froot Loops.

I hate it this on Froot Loops, but any sugared cereal really has a high glycemic index and I think that, not only is breakfast important by itself, but the composition of the breakfast is really important, too.

The glycemic index is basically a measure of how quickly the body absorbs the carbohydrate 7 and converts it to fuel. When it comes to sustained brainpower, Bravender explains that food low on the scale, such as less refined wholerain, are preferable. He says even though a bowl of Froot Loops and a bowl of old-fashioned oatmeal may have the same number of carbs, they have different glycemic loads.

The Froot Loops will get in your body really quickly and cause a peak in blood sugar levels that then falls pretty dramatically after about 2 hours or so, the oatmeal, on the other hand, is absorbed a lot slower and so you get a nice slow rise in blood sugar levels and nice amount of energy to last through the morning and you don’t get that fall.

Bravender says this fall or dip in blood sugar can bring with it a release of hormones 8 that can affect mood.

These hormones are a signal to the body that something, something stressful is going on, and the response of many people to those hormones is to eat.

In some children, those hormones and the hunger can lead to distraction 9 and lack of concentration. Recently, scientists have begun to study this phenomenon. Last year, Tuft university’s psychologist Holly 10 Taylor had one group of elementary school children eat oatmeal for breakfast, another ate Cap'n Crunch 11. Then both of the groups were given some tasks, such as memorizing the names of countries on the map. The oatmeal eaters did up to 20 percent better on the tests.

There were enough to show that the children were remembering more information about these maps um, after having eaten oatmeal.

Both cereals had the same amount of sugar, but Taylor says the difference is that the oatmeal had more protein, more fiber 12 and therefore a lower glycemic index. These findings beg more research. But Duke’s Terrill Bravender says they do suggest some basic rules. First, family should focus on making sure that kids do eat something for breakfast. And if you are trying to track glycemic load, a quick shortcut 13 is to serve less processed foods that have some protein and fiber. These would improve the odds 14 it'll hold steady until lunch.

Allison Aubrey , NPR news, Washington.
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fast v.
to eat little or no food for a period of time, especially for religious reasons
Muslims fast during Ramadan.
pediatrics
[医]小儿科
across the board
affecting everyone or everything in a situation or organization
an across-the-board pay increase In July everything we sell is reduced right across the board.
preponderance
1
a preponderance of something
if there is a preponderance of people or things of a particular type in a group, there are more of that type than of any other
There is a preponderance of female students in the music department.
2
a preponderance of the evidence
law most of the evidence in a law case
Froot Loops
[(known as Fruit Loops in Australia) is a brand of breakfast cereal produced by Kellogg's and sold in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and Latin America.]
glycemia
[医]血糖过多
brainpower
1
intelligence, or the ability to think
A lot of brainpower went into solving the problem.
2
educated intelligent people who have special skills, especially in science, considered as a group
the country's shortage of scientific brainpower
wholegrain
adj.
全粒的，全米的
Cap'n Crunch (who also works for Quaker Oats) was a result of market research indicating the one quality kids (who by the early 1960s were behind most cereal-buying decisions) most wanted in a cereal was crunch - i.e., resistance to sogginess when wet. So their chemists devised a reasonably non-toxic substance that would more-or-less live up to the slogan "Stays crunchy even in milk!", and still provide about as much nourishment 15 as most other cereals. Then they pre-sweetened it, i.e., coated it with healthy, energy-packed sugar, and dreamed up the name. All that was lacking was the advertising 16 campaign.