Never skip your breakfast! Here is the reason why?
How often do we fail to comply without breakfast timings due to late night work outings, party or the reasons unexplained? How impactful can skipping become if ignored for some time? A number of research conducted by various medical organizations and institutes have shown that eating breakfast is very much important for reduction of weight, proper metabolism, and overall good health maintenance. A new randomized trial has found that eating a regular and substantial morning meal every morning directly impacts the fat cells function in the body by changing the activity of genes involved in fat metabolism and insulin resistance.
These reports have also laid out that eating a proper and nutritious morning meal every day can reduce the chances of getting type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Even if the morning meal produces more calories than necessary, this can get negated by other energy-burning benefits.
What was the study?
A study was published in the Journal of Physiology, researchers asked 49 people ages 21 to 60 to either eat breakfast or fast until mid-day, every day for six weeks. Those in the breakfast group were asked to eat at least 700 calories by 11 a.m., and at least half of those calories within two hours of waking. They could choose the foods they wanted, but most people opted for typical breakfast foods like cereals, toast, and juice. Before and after the study, the researchers measured everyone’s metabolism, body composition and cardiovascular and metabolic health. They also took biopsies of their fat cells to measure the activity of 44 different genes and proteins related to metabolism and other physiological processes, as well as the cells’ ability to take up sugar, which is the body’s response to changing insulin levels.
Javier Gonzalez, Associate Professor in Nutrition and Metabolism at the University of Bath in the UK, said that skipping breakfast can actually increase the fat burning with some evidence as they found that in people who had normal weights, eating breakfast decreased the activity of genes involved in fat burning. “Breakfast consumption increased total calorie intake in lean people, but this was offset by breakfast also stimulating physical activity energy expenditure in lean people,” he says.
But this was not the case with people who were found to be obese. The more body fat a person had, the less their fat cells respond to insulin and they become susceptive to type 2 diabetes. At least one gene associated with fat burning was also more active among people with obesity in the group that ate breakfast, compared to the fasting group.
Fasting, on the other hand, increased the activity of genes associated with inflammation- but only in people with obesity. ‘ “Therefore, the guidelines for breakfast consumption should perhaps differ depending on whether people are lean or obese,” says Gonzalez. More research is needed, he adds, before such recommendations can be made. Because the people in the study ate breakfasts high in carbohydrates, the researchers are unable to say whether other types of breakfasts—like high-protein meals—would have the same effects. “However, we are now exploring how different types of breakfast influence health,” Gonzalez says, “and how breakfast interacts with other health behaviors such as exercise.”
From the Web
