Skipping Breakfast Does Not Help You Lose Weight: Study

Skipping breakfast does not help you lose weight, finds a new study.

A balanced and healthy morning meal refuels the body after an overnight fast. Health experts advise against missing out the most important meal of the day to avoid a bulging belly, heart diseases and diabetes. Findings from a recent research by the University of Alabama at Birmingham suggest that skipping or eating morning breakfast has no impact on the body weight of adults who are aiming to shed excess pounds.

For 16 week, researchers observed 309 men and women aged between 20 and 65 years who did not have any health problems but were overweight and obese. The study comprised of experimental participants of whom some were asked to eat breakfast before 10 am and the rest did not eat any caloric food before 11 am. The control group had people who skipped eating breakfasts and regular breakfast eaters who did not follow any particular diet or weight loss regime.

After the trial, there were no changes or differences in the weight of subjects in all groups.

"Now that we know the general recommendation of 'eat breakfast every day' has no differential impact on weight loss, we can move forward with studying other techniques for improved effectiveness," said Emily Dhurandhar, study author and assistant professor in the Department of Health Behavior, reports theCBC news.

 "We should try to understand why eating or skipping breakfast did not influence weight loss, despite evidence that breakfast may influence appetite and metabolism."

The authors believe their study is not free from certain restraints like limited observation period or lack of information on the quality of food consumed as breakfast, to accurately conclude no association between breakfast eating habits and weight loss. However, they add the study results must not encourage people to skip breakfast, which can give rise to long-term health issues.  

"The field of obesity and weight loss is full of commonly held beliefs that have not been subjected to rigorous testing; we have now found that one such belief does not seem to hold up when tested," said David Allison, director of the UAB Nutrition Obesity Research Center and senior investigator on the project, reports the Laboratory equipment.

 "This should be a wake-up call for all of us to always ask for evidence about the recommendations we hear so widely offered."

More information is available online in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.