Breakfast habits by the numbers (Hint: It isn't looking good for breakfast!)

Food Dive surveyed more than a thousand respondents using Google Consumer Surveys, asking each person one simple question: "How many days per week do you eat breakfast?"

Using Google's single-question format, which grabs responses from adult U.S. Internet users, we found some interesting results. Most notably, the survey showed that only 45.6% of the survey-takers eat breakfast seven days per week. The results also showed that the average respondent eats breakfast 4.5 days per week.

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And there's more info where that came from. We didn't drill down into the habits of cronut vs. donut consumers or Count Chocula fans vs. Grape-Nuts lovers, but we did discover that gender, age and where someone lives can correspond with how likely they are to eat the most important meal of the day.

Insights from the survey included the following:

BY GENDER: Women were more likely to eat breakfast seven days per week than men, averaging 4.8 days in their responses, compared with an average answer of 4.3 days from men.

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BY AGE: Young respondents in the 18-24 age range averaged only 3.6 days per week, making them the least frequent breakfast eaters on the survey, while those 65 and older beat everyone else, averaging 5.1 days per week in their responses.

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BY LOCATION: Urbanites outpaced both rural and suburban respondents, averaging 4.9 days per week. More than half of the urban responses (51.4%) indicated that they eat breakfast every day of the week.

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OTHER HIGHLIGHTS: The survey turned up a handful of other insights as well. For instance, we found that respondents earning $25-49K per year tended to vary in response by age. We also saw more dramatic differences in urban-vs.-suburban responses in the South than in the Midwest.

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[Editor's note: These results from Google Consumer Surveys are weighted by inferred gender, age and geography in order to make the sample more representative of the Internet population. The survey was conducted from Sept. 18-20 using a sample of the U.S. adult Internet population.]

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