Shereen Dindar January 17, 2011 – 10:26 am
In 2008, a study was published suggesting that eating a big, high-calorie breakfast was a more effective way of losing weight in the long-term than eating a modest, lower calorie breakfast. The study used two groups of people on two different diets — a small breakfast group and big breakfast group. After 8 months, the big breakfast group lost more than 21% of their body weight, while small breakfast group only lost 4.5%. The study’ s authors suggested that eating a higher calorie breakfast caused people to eat less calories throughout the day by curbing appetite and cravings for carbohydrates.
This caused a stir in the diet and nutrition industries. However, as often happens in the medical research world, a few years later another study is published claiming the exact opposite. This is what happened Monday with a new German study published in the open access, peer-reviewed Nutrition Journal.
The new study looks at self-reports from 300 people who were asked to keep a journal of what they ate. The participants ate either a big or small breakfast, and sometimes skipped breakfast all together.
“The results of the study showed that people ate the same [calories] at lunch and dinner, regardless of what they had for breakfast”, said lead researcher Dr .Volker Schusdziarra from the University of Munich in a statement. This means that a big breakfast (on average 400 calories greater than a small breakfast) resulted in a total increase in calories eaten over the day of about 400 calories. The only difference seen was by skipping a mid morning snack when someone ate a big breakfast, however this was not enough to offset the extra calories they had already eaten.
Dr. Schusdziarra also points out that previous research only looked at how eating a big breakfast caused people to eat less throughout the day, but did not look at whether it caused them to consumed less calories in total for the whole day.
Read more: http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/01/17/does-eating-a-big-breakfast-help-you-lose-weight/#ixzz1BP7JlztU
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