Healthy Breakfast a Predictor of Lower Weight

People who ate a healthy breakfast were found generally to weigh less than their counterparts who either ate a high-calorie, fatty meal or skipped it altogether. So concluded a recent study, which was reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. It examined responses from more than 12,000 American adults who took part in three federal health surveys between 1999 and 2004. The research found that men who ate a healthy breakfast weighed less on average, and that women also weighed less if they ate any sort of breakfast at all, healthy or not.

A "healthy" breakfast was defined as a meal low in energy density, which is the number of calories per unit of food. A doughnut and a Danish pastry, for example, are foods with a high energy density. Fruits, vegetables and whole-grain products are low-energy-density foods. In addition, researchers found that those who ate lower-calorie foods for breakfast tended to have a higher-quality diet in general.

Thus, those who have a breakfast of cereal are more likely to be less heavy than either people who tuck into a breakfast of bacon and eggs or who skip the morning meal entirely. The study results emphasize how important it is to choose low-energy-density items for breakfast, according to James Rippe, one of the researchers and a cardiologist with the Rippe Lifestyle Institute in Shrewsbury, Mass.

The Rippe organization operates the Breakfast Research Institute, an industry-sponsored group that financed the current study. Generally speaking, the study showed that Americans who ate a breakfast low in energy density in the past day were more likely than others to choose lower-calorie foods for the other two meals of the day. This group also had a diet with a wider variety of foods and that was richer in vitamins and minerals.

The men in this low-energy-density group tended to be less heavy, even with factors like exercise and income taken into consideration. For women, any sort of breakfast was correlated with a lower likelihood of obesity - though the energy density of other meals seemed to play a role, too.