A new study appears to confirm the old saying that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Swedish researchers have found that teenagers who consume nutritionally poor breakfasts are much more likely to go on to develop metabolic syndrome years later.

Metabolic syndrome refers to a group of conditions including obesity, high blood pressure and abnormal cholesterol levels, which combine to increase the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Having just one of these conditions increases your risk of a serious disease. However in metabolic syndrome, when all the conditions are present together, the risk is even greater.

The researchers questioned a large group of teenagers in 1981 about the type of breakfast they normally consumed. Twenty-seven years later, the now adults underwent a health check to see if they were showing any signs of metabolic syndrome.

The study found that those who had consumed poor breakfasts during adolescence were much more likely to have metabolic syndrome 27 years later compared to those who ate better breakfasts.

In fact, the incidence of metabolic syndrome among those who did not eat any breakfast or ate a nutritionally poor one, was 68% higher compared to those who ate a more substantial breakfast.

The results stood even when other lifestyle and socioeconomic factors were taken into account.

"Further studies are required for us to be able to understand the mechanisms involved in the connection between poor breakfast and metabolic syndrome, but our results and those of several previous studies suggest that a poor breakfast can have a negative effect on blood sugar regulation," the team from Umeå
University said.

Details of these findings are published in the journal, Public Health Nutrition.