The Best Kind of Breakfast

Some say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, thus it should be a consistent one, while others claim it's better to skip it completely.

Luckily, a new report coming from BioMed Central's open access journal Nutrition Journal, brings some clarification into all this.

Dr Volker Schusdziarra, from the Else-Kröner-Fresenius Center of Nutritional Medicine, carried out an enlightening research involving 300 people, who were asked to keep a journal of what they usually ate, every day.

Sometimes study participants ate a big breakfast, sometimes a small one and sometimes even skipped it completely.

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

This being said, it means that when people had a big breakfast – on average 400kcal greater than a small one, they basically increase their amount of daily calories by about 400kcal.

The only slight difference that was seen was when someone ate a big breakfast and then skipped the mid morning snack, but this was not enough to offset the extra calories they had already eaten.

Previous research suggested that having a big breakfast reduces total calories intake over the day, but this new study proved the data was misleading and false, since it only accounted for the ratio of breakfast calories to daily calories.

Schusdziarra's study concluded that this ratio seemed to be most affected by people eating less during the day, otherwise said their breakfast was proportionally, without necessarily being bigger.

So, all those who want to lose weight and are used to eat a lot in the morning, they should compensate during the day and eat substantially less.

And in order to lose weight efficiently, NHS guidelines suggest restricting calorie intake, cutting down on saturated fat and sugar, and eating 5 fruits and vegetables a day.