Your health: Study finds breakfast may not be crucial

Study finds breakfast may not be crucial

It has long been hailed as the most important meal of the day, vital for getting the body going and preventing overeating later on.

But breakfast may not be so vital after all, if new research is to be believed, the Daily Mail reports.

Contrary to popular belief, the study found the first meal of the day had little impact on snacking or portion sizes later in the day. It also had no effect on metabolism.

The researchers, from the University of Bath, now suggest the better health of people who eat a good breakfast may be due to their general, wider, diet regime.

They found there was no change in metabolism after six weeks between those who ate nothing for breakfast and those who consumed 700 calories before 11 a.m. - 350 of these within two hours of waking.

The major difference was that those who abstained from breakfast ate fewer calories over the whole day. This goes against the long-held theory that people who skip breakfast simply make up for it by gorging on food later on.

However, breakfast eaters were likely to expend more energy - around 442 calories - by being active, mainly in the morning after eating.

They also had more stable blood sugar readings, especially by the end of the trial.

Does Diet Coke cause weight gain?

You may not need to give up diet soda to lose weight.

The September issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition just published a meta-analysis of the existing research on artificial sweeteners and weight gain.

The conclusion lands in support of artificial sweeteners in the right context, specifically when they are substituted for sugar, reports The Atlantic.

People tend to see "modest weight loss," suggesting that low-calorie sweeteners indeed "may be a useful dietary tool to improve compliance with weight-loss or weight-maintenance plans."

That might seem obvious, but several studies have suggested that eating/drinking these sweeteners actually leads to weight gain.

That has to do with satiety signals, effects on insulin levels, changes in the body's fluid balances, and other not-immediately-apparent downstream factors.

The key distinction in studying and using these artificial sweeteners is the idea of replacement as opposed to addition.