Eating A Big Breakfast May Help Boost Metabolism, New Study Finds

In the seemingly never-ending debate of to breakfast or not to breakfast, a new study has come down in favor of breakfast, at least in terms of how a large breakfast compares to a large dinner.

In order to consider how the timing of the meal (and thus, whether it's considered breakfast, lunch, or dinner) affects metabolism the researchers focused on a process called diet-induced thermogenesis, also known as DIT. This is a measure of the way the body uses energy for the absorption, digestion, transport, and storage of nutrients. It's considered a marker for how well our metabolism is working.

In the study, participants ate a more caloric breakfast and less caloric dinner for the first round, followed by the opposite for the second round. Though it used a small sample group (only 16 men participated) they saw that eating a larger portion of calories in the morning was associated with a DIT that was over twice as high.

They also found that peaks in blood sugar and insulin as a result of eating were less severe after a large breakfast than a large dinner and that a smaller breakfast was associated with more sugar cravings throughout the day.

Probably not. The researchers do say that, based on their results, making breakfast your biggest meal may be advisable for certain people.

According to Richter, they "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."