ABSTRACT
This study was carried out to promote healthy nutritional behaviour in terms of eating breakfast among university students, through emphasizing the importance of breakfast on assimilation and exposing the obvious but constantly ignored consequences of skipping breakfast on their cognitive ability and general wellbeing.
This study made use of the survey research design. The instrument for the study was the structured questionnaire which was validated by two lecturers from the Department of Health, Safety and Environmental Education. The population of this study is the entire students of the University of Benin of about 39,243 undergraduate in it's fourteen faculties. Simple random sampling technique was used to select four faculties in the University of Benin and 3% of the final year students of each of the four faculties which was randomly selected, resulting to a total of 118 students as the sample size. One hundred and eighteen questionnaires were distributed to the final year students of the randomly sampled faculties which are Agriculture, Education, Management Science and Life Science. The questionnaires were retrieved and data analysis was done based on the responses of the Respondents.
The results of data analyzed established that breakfast plays an important role in the assimilating and cognitive functioning of students. If students skip breakfast continuously for several reasons as identified in the study, there are implications which include lack of concentration or short attention span, difficulty in assimilating, understanding and processing information, headaches, fatigue, restlessness, mood swings and other adverse effects on health which will not only affect the academic performance of the students but their general wellbeing. Therefore, the recommendations in this study should be implemented in our schools (primary, secondary and tertiary), as a hungry student cannot learn
