Restful sleep, regular meals and never skipping breakfast. These are some tips from the experts of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità for more than 7 million children and adolescents dealing with the first bell after 3 months of vacation that favor the forward shift of the sleep-wake rhythm and a diet not punctuated by timetables, both situations that potentially contrast with a good resumption of school activities, which require attention, concentration and the right energy.
For many students, early September is therefore the time to recover a lost regularity, or to gain a new one, starting with rest and diet. Sleep – the ISS says – is the way our body uses to recharge the energy spent during the waking period, and is crucial for memory consolidation and concentration. Sleeping well and enough promotes learning and long-term memorization and also the management of emotions. Experts’ recommendations for the school-age population are to sleep between 9 and 11 hours at 6-13 years old and between 8 and 10 hours at 14-17.
Children and adolescents have different needs and schedules: children may have difficulty falling asleep on their own, while adolescents have a natural tendency to stay up late due to changes in biological rhythms. And adolescents may find it difficult to self-regulate their sleep-wake rhythm or their use of electronic devices, especially in the evening when they are relaxing in their room. It is therefore important for parents to set rules to help their children manage their daily rhythms and to start following these rules a few days before the first bell rings.
Good sleep helps manage emotions: children and adolescents who sleep little can become grumpy, irritable, aggressive, with repercussions on their relationship with rules and also with classmates and teachers. Not only that. Lack of sleep and poor quality of sleep can also be associated with the risk of developing addictions to video games, smartphones, and social networks, with repercussions on school performance, as well as physical health and social skills. From the ISS survey ‘Behavioral addictions in Generation Z: a prevalence study in the school population (11-17 years) and focus on parental skills’ conducted through questionnaires on those born between the 1990s and the early 2010s, it appears that there is a relationship between sleep and addictions.
11-13 year olds at risk of developing social media addiction (SMA) also show worse sleep hygiene than their peers who do not show this risk: 49.4% of them sleep less than 6 hours a night and almost 30% take more than 45 minutes to fall asleep. And among 14-17 year old students at risk of SMA, about 85% reported poor sleep quality. Students in the group at risk of video game addiction (Internet Gaming Disorder – IGD) who are between 11 and 13 years old also have worse sleep hygiene: 30.6% slept less than 6 hours a night in the month before the interview and almost 25% take more than 45 minutes to fall asleep. 71.5% of 14-17 year olds at risk of IGD reported poor sleep quality.
Students who show behaviors compatible with food addiction (Food Addiction – FA, a behavioral disorder that manifests itself with a compulsive need to eat) also have a worse quality of sleep. In the 11-13 year old population, 40.8% of those with severe FA slept less than 6 hours a night in the month before the interview, and 28.8% took more than 45 minutes to fall asleep. The same trend was seen among 14-17 year olds: in this case, 87% of those with a severe FA profile reported poor quality of sleep.
To better deal with the return to school, the ISS recommends not skipping breakfast. The third thematic report of the HBSC-Italia Surveillance 2022 (Health Behavior in School-aged Children: eating habits, weight status and physical activity of adolescents) shows that 26.8% of adolescents ‘never’ eat breakfast. But of the three meals of the day, breakfast is the most important, because it interrupts the longest fast, the nighttime one, and this has a strong impact on the metabolism. If having breakfast is therefore a good habit for anyone, it is especially so for those who have to maintain a good level of concentration throughout the morning, and therefore for students.
Breakfast is influenced by family habits and the culture of origin: some people have breakfast with eggs, some with salmon, some with bread and jam. According to ISS experts, if you follow a balanced diet for 24 hours, you can have breakfast however you want, but the composition of the first meal of the day should not lack wholemeal carbohydrates, which are not ‘cereals’ like cornflakes, but wholemeal bread or wholemeal biscuits. Wholemeal carbohydrates are foods with a long energy release, that is, they are absorbed slowly during the morning, and for this reason they can provide the energy needed to stay alert and concentrate a little longer than other foods.
Restoring a regular timing of meals once back from vacation is essential – the ISS emphasizes – for everyone and especially for children and teenagers because regularity allows you to space out food intake with the right times that have a good effect on metabolism, regulating the production of hormones that regulate blood sugar levels, essential for concentration and school activities. If from a metabolic point of view the most important meal is breakfast, from a quantitative point of view lunch must be central. It is a mistake that dinner is the most important and abundant meal. Children and teenagers who work ‘long hours’ should eat lunch from the school canteen, balanced both in quantity and composition and structured according to the recommendations of the Ministry of Health.
While breakfast, lunch and dinner are the main meals of the day and therefore must be ‘protected’, that is, they must not be ‘skipped’, the mid-morning snack, or the mid-afternoon snack, serve to break the fast 2-3 hours after breakfast and 3-4 after lunch. For a snack, a fresh seasonal fruit is fine while ultra-processed foods rich in salt, sugar and saturated fats should be avoided (snacks, snacks, crisps in bags).
Instead, there are no scientific reasons to provide supplements or vitamins for memory or for any other reason to students. The diet of children and teenagers, they remind the ISS, must be balanced, well-balanced and unless there are allergies or intolerances or other medical indications, it must not exclude anything. Therefore, supplements for children and teenagers have no indication, unless they are used to integrate nutrient deficiencies due to exclusions for allergies and/or food intolerances. The diet for children with intolerances or allergies and also for weight reduction must be developed and controlled by professionals.
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