Mum and Dad always said breakfast was the most important meal of the day – and it turns out that eating a big one may help you control your appetite.
Research published in Cell Metabolism has found that, while front-loading most of your calories doesn’t really affect how quickly your body metabolises them, it does help you feel less hungry later in the day.
The study involving 16 men and 14 women randomly assigned each of them a morning-loaded or evening-loaded diet for four weeks, before switching them to the opposite diet for another four weeks.
According to senior author Professor Alexandra Johnstone, an appetite control researcher at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen, while energy expenditure and total weight loss was the same for both diets – just over 3kg, on average – participants did report subjective differences.
“The participants reported that their appetites were better controlled on the days they ate a bigger breakfast and that they felt satiated throughout the rest of the day.
“This could be quite useful in the real-world environment, versus in the research setting that we were working in,” she said.
Professor Johnstone believes studies like this could help improve research around time-restricted eating and intermittent fasting as a weight loss measure, though cautions it is still early days.
“One thing that’s important to note is that when it comes to timing and dieting, there is not likely going to be one diet that fits all.
“Figuring this out is going to be the future of diet studies, but it’s something that’s very difficult to measure,” she said.
Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to order a full English breakfast.
