Friday, April 16, 2010

High-Fat Breakfast May Help You Lose Weight


A high-fat breakfast may be the best way to help you lose weight and stay healthy, according to a new study published this month in the International Journal of Obesity by researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).

Mice fed a high-carbohydrate meal at the beginning of the day gained more weight than mice starting the day with a high-fat meal, and experienced more metabolic syndrome. The experiment was repeated 4 times, and the results were consistent. "The data were so convincing," said lead author Molly Bray, professor of epidemiology at UAB School of Public Health, "that everybody in the lab started eating chicken biscuits and sausage biscuits in the morning."

Says
senior author Martin Young, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine in the UAB division of Cardiovascular Disease: "the first meal you have appears to program your metabolism for the rest of the day. This study suggests that if you ate a carbohydrate-rich breakfast it would promote carbohydrate utilization throughout the rest of the day, whereas, if you have a fat-rich breakfast, you have metabolic plasticity to transfer your energy utilization between carbohydrate and fat."

The authors of the study hope to find a way to get people to lose weight and stay healthy by changing the timing of what they eat, rather than by restricting the total caloric intake - an approach that has not been widely investigated. If the study results can be proved true for humans as well, it will make more sense to have high-fat breakfasts and low fat dinners.

Want to read more about this? The UAB press release has detailed information, as does the Birmingham News story. More commentary can be found on NHS Choice UK, Science Blog, Fox News Health, Science Daily Science 2.0, ENN, DrSharma, PhysOrg, TheFamilyGP, AOL Health, iHealthBulletin, eScienceNews, Medical News Today, the Globe and Mail, and Health News.

study in the International Journal of Obesity

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