You may have heard that eating a big breakfast keeps your appetite in check for the rest of the day, ultimately helping you lose a few pounds. But the latest research dispels this health myth, according to a study published in BioMed Central’s Nutrition Journal.
For the study, scientists at the Else-Kröner-Fresenius Center of Nutritional Medicine in Munich, Germany, examined the food journals of more than 300 people. Study participants recorded eating big breakfasts, small breakfasts and no breakfast.
Researchers found breakfast size had little impact on the size of participants’ lunch and dinner. This meant that eating a big breakfast—on average, one with 400 calories more than a small breakfast—simply added about 400 more calories to the person’s food intake that day. (Sometimes a really big breakfast led people to skip a mid-morning snack, but this wasn’t enough to make up for the extra breakfast calories.)
How does this square with earlier research suggesting that eating a bigger breakfast helped with weight loss? Well, according to researchers, previous studies looked at the amount of breakfast calories, not total number of calories eaten over the course of one day. People lost weight when they ate a bigger breakfast but also reduced the number of calories they ate at lunch and dinner.
The bottom line is there’s no big-breakfast secret to losing weight. If you eat more at the breakfast table—preferably a healthy meal with lots of healthy fruit and fiber—you’ll also have to cut back on your calorie intake for the rest of the day.
Click here for advice on how to get the most out of the day’s first meal.
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