Skipping Breakfast Does Not Tip Back the Scale

It's no surprise that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, providing you with nutrients to jumpstart your day. But a new study shows that contrary to polular belief, breakfast bears no weight on, well, your weight.

"Previous studies have mostly demonstrated correlation, but not necessarily causation," lead author Emily Dhurandhar, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Health Behavior at the University of Alabama Birmingham (UAB) said in a statement. "In contrast, we used a large, randomized controlled trial to examine whether or not breakfast recommendations have a causative effect on weight loss, with weight change as our primary outcome."

The new study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, indicates that those who regularly ate breakfast were just as likely to lose the same amount of weight as those who skipped the morning meal. There are health benefits, no doubt, to jumpstarting your day with the right nutrients; weight loss may not be one of them.

To test the theory, researchers conducted a 16-week trial for 20-65 years olds who wanted to lose weight, and divided them into three groups. After handing each group a copy of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) pamphlet entitled "Let's Eat for the Health of it," participants were instructed either to eat breakfast consistently before 10 a.m. or to refrain from eating before 11 a.m.

Following the study period in which 283 of the 309 participants completed the study, researchers found that all participants lost about the same amount of weight.

"The field of obesity and weight loss is full of commonly held beliefs that have not been subjected to rigorous testing; we have now found that one such belief does not seem to hold up when tested," noted David Allison Ph.D., director of the UAB Nutrition Obesity Research Center.