Stop Eating Breakfast?

New study suggests that starting your day with a big breakfast doesn't help with weight loss.

By Karen Springen, Men’s Health

Could everything you’ve heard about breakfast be wrong?

“Eating breakfast is just added calories. You’ll never compensate for them at subsequent meals,” Volker Schusdziarra, M.D., professor of internal medicine at the Technical University of Munich, told The New York Times.

What?! Has this guy had one too many Spaten’s, or did he just say that we shouldn’t eat breakfast?

Dr. Schusdziarra hasn’t yet returned our e-mails, so we don’t know if he was taken out of context. But here’s what his study, published in Nutrition Journal, found: Eating a big breakfast doesn’t actually make you eat less later.

In the experiment, the German researchers analyzed 10 days worth of food journals kept by 380 people—280 of them obese and 100 of them normal weight. No matter what people ate in the morning, they consumed roughly the same amount of food at lunch and dinner. Meaning: When they ate a tiny breakfast, they downed fewer calories that day.

Now, we’re not talking about gigantic Bob Evans buffets: The biggest breakfast in the study came in at 611 calories—a reasonable helping for the average guy. The smallest was about 100 calories.

For years, we’ve heard (and preached) that breakfast helps us avoid overeating and boosts our metabolism. So is this study believable? We looked at the research and called leading nutrition and breakfast experts to figure it out.

First, the drawbacks of the study:

Food diaries. The German study relied on self-reported food intake. But studies have established that people, especially obese ones, say they eat less than they actually do. It’s more accurate to watch people eat in a lab or even to get them to use a cell phone camera to photograph what they eat, explains Nikhil Dhurandhar, Ph.D., an associate professor at Louisiana’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center who has conducted numerous obesity studies.

Also, people eat less than they normally do when they keep food diaries, research has found. That’s why they’re often recommended as a weight-loss tool.

Both problems may have been the case here: In the German breakfast study, the participants reported eating a suspiciously low total number of calories. Obese subjects ate between 1,200 and 1,700 calories a day. Which begs the question, “How are they obese?” It’s possible that they weren’t accurately recording what they ate, or they changed their eating habits during the study—or both.

Exercise. Researchers looked at energy intake but failed to account for energy expenditure. “Suppose people who eat breakfast are those who do so because they then cycle or walk to work like I do every day,” says nutrition and obesity researcher Gavin Sandercock, Ph.D., of the University of Essex. “We simply don’t know what the participants were doing all day. This is a big limitation of the data presented.” In fact, a 2005 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that adults who eat breakfast are more likely to be exercisers.

So in the German study, people could just be burning off the extra calories they ate at breakfast with exercise—hardly warranting the advice to “stop eating breakfast.” But we can’t say, since this wasn’t reported.

Breakdown of carbs, fat, and protein. The study didn’t report exactly what people ate, just how many calories they downed. But research has shown that it makes a difference whether someone eats a carb-heavy versus a high-protein breakfast.

In an often-cited story from 2005, U.S. researchers found that subjects ate 574 calories for lunch after a breakfast of eggs, toast, and jelly—but 738 calories after a breakfast of a bagel, cream cheese, and yogurt.

What this means for our German subjects: Maybe they need a breakfast upgrade. Had they been eating balanced breakfasts with protein, they might have eaten less for lunch. But we’re just guessing here. Again, it’s impossible to know without raiding the researchers’ drawers and getting our mitts on the food diaries. . . . which we’d like do to, except that as we pointed out, we can’t trust the diaries anyway. (Plus, Germany is a long way from our offices.)

Here are two simple rules to start your day off right, based off of years of solid scientific research.

Breakfast rule #1: Eat something. Study after study has linked skipping breakfast to being heavier and having a larger waist. As we’ve previously reported, lifelong breakfast skippers have an extra 1.8 inches on their waist, on average, compared to people who have always eaten breakfast. That’s also just one study, but anecdotally, most nutritionists say it makes sense based on their observations while working with real people in the real world.

Another reason to rise and dine: Missing meals can stifle your muscle gains. “If we don’t eat breakfast, we are going for a really long time before fueling our body again—go too long without a meal, and that can make your body start metabolizing muscle to make glucose,” says nutritionist Megan McCrory, Ph.D., of Purdue University.

Ideally, aim to eat about 30 to 35 percent of your daily calories before lunch, recommends Dave Grotto, R.D., author of 101 Optimal Life Foods. Pressed on time? Whip up one of these 10 Quick and Easy Breakfasts.

Breakfast rule #2: Fill it full of nutrition. Common breakfast foods—oatmeal, cereal, bagels—are heavy in carbs, low in muscle-building protein and nutrient-packed produce. You can do better. Like this balanced, super-quick recipe from Bill Hartman, P.T., C.S.C.S.: Prepare a package of instant oatmeal and mix in a scoop of whey protein powder and 1/2 cup of blueberries.