Have a big breakfast?
It is not necessarily good for your diet
A study conducted in England found that the explanation that those who eat a big breakfast eat fewer calories during the day is not necessarily true.
And also - when will science be consistent and decisive about the most important meal of the day?
Voila system!
health
12/09/2022
Monday, September 12, 2022, 06:21 Updated: 07:34
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breakfast table (shutterstock)
The common belief that eating a big breakfast and a light dinner helps people burn more calories may be wrong.
A new study published Friday in the journal Cell Metabolism found that eating most calories in the morning doesn't help people lose weight any more than eating those calories in the evening.
The findings were based on a controlled trial involving 30 adults in the UK who were obese or overweight.
For four weeks, the participants followed one of two diets: About half of them consumed 45 percent of their daily calories at breakfast, then 35 percent at lunch, and 20 percent at dinner.
The other half consumed 20 percent of daily calories at breakfast, followed by 35 percent at lunch and 45 percent at dinner.
The groups then switched to the opposite diet for another four weeks.
Both groups consumed slightly more than 1,700 calories per day.
Large breakfasts included foods such as cereal, toast, eggs, sausages, smoothies and yogurt.
Large dinners included foods such as beef and mushrooms with rice, pasta bolognese or pork chops with potatoes and peas.
In most nutrition studies, researchers don't provide meals to study participants, so the current study offers a rare look at how one factor—the timing of a person's largest daily meal rather than the food—affects metabolism and weight loss.
Is a big breakfast good or bad?
A really big breakfast (Photo: ShutterStock)
Finally, the researchers looked at how much weight each group participant lost after four weeks of the big breakfast diet and the big dinner diet.
The results came out the same: around 3 kilograms.
This is clear evidence that people did not burn more calories from eating a big breakfast, according to Professor Courtney Peterson, a nutrition science expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who was not involved in the study.
The results show that "there's no magical fat-burning effect from timing your meals," Peterson said.
However, people in the study said they felt less hungry during the day when they consumed the bulk of their calories at breakfast.
So it's possible that big breakfasts can help with weight loss over longer periods of time by reducing appetite, Peterson said.
"There are two ways to lose weight: You can burn more calories or you can eat less," she said. "In the real world, if people are less hungry, they eat less,
But aside from weight loss, there may be other good reasons to eat a big breakfast.
The first is that breakfast breaks the fast from the night and helps us to be more alert, focused and calm.
Another reason is that people are more sensitive to insulin in the morning, so an early meal may help regulate blood sugar levels.
On the other hand, eating too late at night - from around 20:00 onwards, may raise blood sugar levels and cause people to store more energy as fat.
health
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Breakfast
calories
diet