Eating a balanced breakfast has been linked to better weight loss and health markers by scientists probing the diets of hundreds of older adults in Spain.
Researchers following 383 adults aged 55-75 with obesity and metabolic syndrome found those who ate large breakfasts or who skipped breakfast altogether had a higher level of excess weight.
What Is Metabolic Syndrome?
Metabolic syndrome is a medical term for a cluster of factors that put you at higher risk of certain chronic diseases. These factors include obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and a high level of fatty compounds called lipids in the bloodstream.
Metabolic syndrome is related to insulin resistance and can harm the blood vessels. But scientists don’t know exactly how it works or what causes it.
Eating A Mediterranean Breakfast
Scientists monitored the diets of 383 adults to learn more about the impact of breakfast on body mass index, which is calculated from a person’s height and weight.
Adults with a BMI of 30 or higher are considered obese, while those with a BMI between 25 and 30 are considered overweight. In the U.S., more than 40% of adults aged 20 or over have obesity, while a further 34% are overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Excess body mass is linked to a large number of serious health problems, including heart disease, type two diabetes, certain cancers and stroke.
All study participants had been advised to eat a “Mediterranean”-style diet as part of a larger research project. This involves eating lots of vegetables and wholegrain foods. Scientists only observed what they ate and didn’t actively intervene.
Scientists measured how many calories participants ate at breakfast, as well as health metrics like BMI and waist circumference, at several points over the course of the three-year study. They also monitored the quality of breakfast foods eaten, according to nutrients like protein, fat, fiber and carbohydrate.
Good Breakfast, Better Health Metrics
Participants who ate large breakfasts or who didn’t eat breakfast at all had a 2 to 3.5% higher BMI than those who ate a moderately-sized breakfast. For men, that meant eating 500-750 calories. for women, it was 400 to 600 calories. That makes up about 20 to 30% of an adult’s total daily recommended calories.
For reference, a bowl of unsweetened cornflakes with skimmed cow’s milk comes in at around 210 calories, while a banana is around 90. A breakfast of bread with eggs can range between 200 and 500 calories, depending on how it’s cooked and how much bread and egg are consumed.
Other health data, including waist circumference and lipid levels in the blood, were best for those participants who ate a moderate breakfast. Regardless of meal size, those who ate a high-quality breakfast were more likely to have worse health data.
A lower-quality breakfast would be high in nutrients like salt, sugar and saturated fat, which are already well-established risk factors for several diseases when eaten in excess.
Breakfast Still ‘The Most Important Meal Of The Day’
The researchers weren’t able to exclude the impact of factors like exercise from the study, nor did they intervene and give participants particular food to eat. So they could not establish a causative link between a moderate breakfast size and better health metrics.
But they did suggest eating a decent-sized meal might prevent snacking later in the day.
“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but what and how you eat it matters,” said study author professor Álvaro Hernáez from Ramon Llull University in a statement. “Eating controlled amounts — not too much or too little — and ensuring good nutritional composition is crucial.”
“Our data show that quality is associated with better cardiovascular risk factor outcomes. It’s as important to have breakfast as it is to have a quality one,” he added, per MailOnline.
The breakfast research was published in the Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging.
