Dieters are often urged to eat breakfast as a way to lose weight, so they don’t binge later in the day. But two new studies suggest this conventional wisdom is wrong. In one, researchers recruited 309 people and randomly assigned overweight individuals to eat breakfast or to skip it for 16 weeks. There was no meaningful difference in weight loss, including among those who said they usually miss breakfast and were assigned to the group asked to eat it. The authors of the paper, published today in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, speculate that the volunteers compensated for any changes in food intake at other times of the day. A second, smaller report in the same journal assigned lean adults to breakfast or no breakfast and found little impact on metabolism and heart health. The work follows an earlier study by the same senior author, which argued that past work failed to make an airtight case linking breakfast and weight loss.
At press time, no links were available to the new studies.