Breakfast on the brain
A fire alarm sounds, there’s a showdown in the corridor and a busy teacher forgot you were coming today. Fieldwork can be challenging, says Dr Katie Adolphus, “You have to remember it’s a school, first and foremost, not a lab.”
But with the support of a deputy headteacher with a background in food technology, Katie was able to conduct influential research while giving back to the school. She taught the young people an important lesson: eat breakfast.
Katie had been interested in nutrition since she was a teenager herself, but she didn’t want to become a dietician because of the clinical focus. And, at the time, nutrition was nearly always focussed on restriction and low-calorie diets, irrespective of food quality. Katie was more interested in overall health, so she first studied physiology before doing a Masters in nutrition and public health.
During her Masters, Katie became aware of the link between certain nutrients and mental health conditions like depression, Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline. “I fell in love with the research”, she says, and she was inspired by the teaching of PhD students. So when she saw a PhD opportunity to research breakfast and cognition in secondary school pupils led by Professor Louise Dye, she knew it was for her.
You have to remember it’s a school, first and foremost, not a lab.
However, schools face a lot of challenges, with pressures of inspections and competing priorities. And many young people growing up in poverty are struggling with bigger problems than whether or not they eat breakfast. So it’s hard to improve nutrition, making Katie ask herself, “Am I even making a dent?”
In her study looking at GCSE grades in a sixth form, she certainly did. As well as demonstrating that eating breakfast is associated with higher grades, she had a direct impact on the pupils’ lives. She created a partnership between her lab and the school to run breakfast food taste testing sessions, donate textbooks and give talks on issues particularly relevant to young people, such as energy drink consumption, healthy eating and higher education.
This school-lab partnership work was made possible by the deputy headteacher who shared Katie’s passion for nutrition. Fitting in at school is a perennial problem, but the deputy headteacher helped Katie integrate as member of staff and explained the value of the project in ‘teacher terms’ to staff who were resistant to participating at first. Having this connection and support made the project a success and raised school-wide awareness of nutrition’s impact on overall health and academic performance.
Making a national impact
In the political landscape of the 2010s, when Katie’s research took place, funding for free school meals was focused on lunch, and Katie wouldn’t want that reduced. But schools often put core subjects like English and Maths at the start of the day with the aim of improving engagement. So, many young people who skip breakfast are attempting top priority subjects on an empty stomach.
This problem is getting worse as the cost of living crisis leads to rising rates of food insecurity. More young people will be skipping breakfast now, not out of choice, but because there’s no food in the house.
More funding for free school breakfasts across all ages would help, Katie argues. Her research has already helped to make that happen, including being cited in Parliament as evidence to support the School Breakfast Bill.
Katie would like to see more research into how the nutrition of different breakfast foods affect cognition and academic performance. But her research makes it clear that any breakfast is better than no breakfast at all.
About Katie
Dr Katie Adolphus is a research fellow at the Human Appetite Research Unit, School of Psychology, University of Leeds and is co-investigator on the H3 project: Healthy soil, Healthy food and Healthy people.
Katie is working on fibre reformulation with the food industry and its benefits to health in collaboration with researchers from Sheffield, Leeds, Bristol, Cambridge, Newcastle and City Universities.
She has recently completed an MRC Fellowship at King’s College London investigating dietary modulation of adult hippocampal neurogenesis via short-chain fatty acids and microbiota–gut–brain communication.
Katie is also an AfN Registered Nutritionist and has expertise on nutrition and health claims legislation and authorisation processes in the context of nutrition and cognitive function.
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