Big Breakfasts Don't Help You Lose Weight

How many times have you heard or read that the key to losing weight lies in eating a solid breakfast?  That you’ll consume fewer calories as the day goes on?

Well, you can toss that advice out the window because a recent study found just the opposite.   Researchers in from the Else-Kröner-Fresenius Center of Nutritional Medicine at the Technical University in Munich, Germany found that people who ate a breakfast with 400 calories more than a small breakfast tended to eat 400 more calories per day.

Hmph.  So, eating a big breakfast is just that: eating a big breakfast!

Their findings suggest that the whole “eating a large breakfast thing” may have actually come about from misinterpretation of research that was saying given a fixed number of calories per day, those people who consumed more of them at breakfast tended to eat less the rest of the day.

Lead researcher, Dr. Volker Schusdziarra, and his colleagues claim that the available information about the role of breakfast energy in total daily energy intake was confusing and contradictory.  Their findings suggest that eating a high calorie breakfast leads to greater overall intake, while other studies that analyzed what individuals did suggest that when people eat a higher proportion of their calories at breakfast then they eat fewer calories per day.

So, good scientists that they are, they decided to evaluate these findings doing their own investigation that applied both beliefs.

They recruited 280 obese and 100 normal weight volunteers and asked them to keep food diaries and record their food intake for up to 2 weeks. Some of the participants ate a big breakfast, some had a small one, and some skipped it altogether.

The results showed that

-Eating more calories at breakfast is linked to larger overall daily intake in both normal weight and obese participants.  (IE, don’t start your day at the McDonald’s drive-thru.)

-When breakfast was a larger proportion of daily intake, this was linked to significant reduction in daily intake only on days when fewer calories were consumed the rest of the day. (IE, you don’t get to eat a big breakfast and a big lunch.)

-Tests of the factors influencing daily calorie intake showed that the number of calories eaten at breakfast had the strongest influence.  (IE, wow!)

So—as you may have guessed—the study has found that reduced breakfast energy intake is associated with lower total daily intake.

According to Dr. Schusdziarra:

"The results of the study showed that people ate the same at lunch and dinner, regardless of what they had for breakfast."

He added that they found that a big breakfast averaging about 400 calories more than a small breakfast resulted in a total increase of about 400 calories over the day.

And there you have it, ladies.  No you have no more excuses to grab that donut in the morning.