Researchers from the universities of Aberdeen and Surrey conducted a controlled study on healthy, overweight participants. The goal is to examine the relationship between the size of breakfast and dinner and how it affects appetite.
The researchers discovered that a large breakfast has no effect on weight loss. The study was published in Cell Metabolism.
Eating Big Meals in the Morning Burns More Calories
Researchers assessed their hypothesis that a big breakfast and a small dinner would increase calories burned and weight loss. To prove it, they fed participants two diets for four weeks.
The first diet consists of a big breakfast and a small dinner, while the second consists of a small breakfast and a big dinner. They kept lunches the same.
They provided all of the meals to make sure of how many calories the study participants were consuming. They also measured the participants' metabolisms, including monitoring how many calories they burned.
All study participants followed the two diet regimens in order to compare the effects of different meal schedules on the same individuals.
Research Result
The experiment's results revealed no difference between the two meal patterns in terms of body weight and any biological indicators of energy use.
Measures of energy usage included basal metabolic rate, indicating the number of calories your body uses at rest, physical activity, and use of a chemical form of water that enables assessment of total daily energy use.
There were also no differences in blood glucose daily levels and with insulin or lipids. It is important to note that changes in these factors in the blood are associated with metabolic health.
The findings are consistent with short-term (one to six days) meal-timing studies, where participants live in a laboratory respiratory chamber (a small, air-tight room equipped with basic comforts) for the duration of the experiment.
Big Breakfast Meals' Effect on Controlling Hunger
Based on the study, the things that affect eating a big breakfast include the quantity of food they want to eat and the hunger they feel. Participants who ate a large breakfast and a little dinner during the day reported feeling less hungry.
Researchers conclude that this effect may be useful for people looking to lose weight. It may help them better control their hunger and eat less. Additionally, the precise timing of each meal was left to the study participants' discretion. Despite this, there was hardly any variation in the timing of each meal.
Yet there were some limitations to the study, as they only studied participants for four weeks for each meal pattern. The effects of early versus late energy intake after four weeks have been found to vary most dramatically in previous studies.
However, the fact that neither the number of calories consumed nor expended changed over the course of four weeks indicates that, had the research been longer, body weight is unlikely to have altered.
Previous Study on Eating Large Meals
The logic behind this theory is most likely the circadian clocks found throughout the body. The clocks regulate the daily rhythms of most of our biological functions, including metabolism. Scientists call it chrono-nutrition.
According to two studies from 2013, weight loss is assisted by eating more calories in the morning and fewer calories at night.
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