No More Bacon And Eggs, Please
According to German researchers who researched 380 people, 280 of whom were obese, no matter how big a breakfast you eat in the morning, your non-breakfast caloric intake will still remain the same. This means people who eat breakfast end up eating more total daily calories than people who skip their morning meal.
The results were the same for healthy-weight and obese adults.
"Whenever someone comes to me for dietary advice and says, ‘I never eat breakfast,' I say, ‘Keep doing what you're doing,'" says the senior author Dr. Volker Schusdziarra, a professor of internal medicine at the Technical University of Munich. "Eating breakfast is just added calories. You'll never compensate for them at subsequent meals."
Breakfast Supporters Disagree
"I'm not buying it on the strength of one study," said James Hill, an obesity expert at the University of Colorado at Denver. "There's nothing in this study that would cause me to change my advice to people that eating breakfast is one of the most important things you can do for your health and your weight."
Christie Munsell, a research assistant at the Rudd Center for Obesity at Yale University, was also surprised by these findings. "It's necessary in the morning to eat in order to replenish the glucose stores we've lost overnight," she said, also pointing out breakfast's role in improving mood, productivity, and memory.
You Are What You Eat
The study found that the foods most often responsible for the variations in daily calories were:
- bread
- eggs
- cheese
- sausages
- marmalade
- butter
Eating breakfast may increase caloric intake, but a healthy breakfast still seems like a good idea.
Read More:
- Diet: Bigger Breakfast, Bigger Daily Calorie Count (New York Times)
- Do Big Breakfasts Create Big Waistlines? (Slashfood)