Eating Big Breakfast Helps You Burn Twice As Many Calories Throughout The Day

Eating a big breakfast could help you burn twice as many calories, a new study suggests.

Researchers at the Lübeck University in Germany published the study this week, after challenging 16 male participants to consume a high-calorie breakfast followed by a low-calorie dinner for three days.

Afterwards, they swapped, having the participants eat a small meal in the morning, and load up on the calories come dinner time.

Scientists found on the days the men indulged in a hearty breakfast, it boosted their metabolism by triggering diet-induced thermogenesis (DIT), a process where the body generates heat.

This lead to up to double the amount of calories being burnt throughout out the day.

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The study, posted in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, also found that eating a low-calorie breakfast boosted appetite, particularly for sweets.

Corresponding author Dr Juliane Richter said: "Our results show a meal eaten for breakfast - regardless of the amount of calories it contains - creates twice as high diet-induced thermogenesis as the same meal consumed for dinner.

"This finding is significant for all people as it underlines the value of eating enough at breakfast."

She added: "We recommend that patients with obesity as well as healthy people eat a large breakfast rather than a large dinner to reduce body weight and prevent metabolic diseases."

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The study follows building research that eating a big breakfast, such as a fry up, is the key to maintaining weight.

A large-scale study from 2017, published in NCBI, tested over 50,000 adults on variables such as number of meals per day, length of overnight fast, consumption of breakfast, and timing of the largest meal to see what effects they had on the body.

Conducted over seven years, it found that breakfast eaters experienced a decreased BMI (body mass index) compared with people who skipped breakfast. It also found that relative to subjects who ate their largest meal at dinner, those who consumed breakfast as their largest meal experienced a significant decrease in BMI.

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It concluded that making your largest meal breakfast, along with cutting out snacking and eating less frequently, could be an effective way to prevent weight gain.

Well, maybe breakfast really is the most important meal of the day. Cue to load up on hash browns...

Topics: Life News, Life, Food And Drink, Health

Ciara Sheppard

Ciara is a freelance writer working for Tyla. After graduating with an English Lit and Media degree from the University of Sussex, Ciara held jobs at GLAMOUR and Yahoo Style before packing up for a solo travelling trip around South America.

@ciarasheppard