Have breakfast and get moving

Have breakfast and get moving


Eating a healthy morning meal might also help you get moving.

Researchers at the University of Bath in England say that eating breakfast can help obese people get more active. The findings are published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The team analyzed the link between breakfast and health among obese people. They compared the results from a group of people who ate breakfast with those from another who did not. Eating breakfast did not make the participants gain weight, but it did lead to increased physical activity in the morning and less eating later in the day. Increasing activity is an important way to improve health in an increasingly sedentary population, so the researchers suggest that breakfast could be beneficial.

To conduct the trial, researchers split people between the ages of 21 to 60 into two groups — those who ate breakfast and those who didn’t — and measured many outcomes for six weeks. The participants who ate breakfast chose their own meals.

The group that ate breakfast consumed at least 700 calories by 11 a.m. — including the first half of that food within two hours of waking. The fasting group was only allowed water until noon.  The results in this obese group build on previous studies from the same researchers studying the effects of eating breakfast for a ‘lean’ population.

The researchers caution that not everyone responds in the same way to breakfast — and not all types of breakfast are equal. The effects of a sugary cereal compared with a high-protein breakfast are likely to be quite different. They hope to do additional experiments comparing different kinds of breakfasts, and make recommendations on the types of food and nutrients that are best.

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