Skipping breakfast has no effect on weight loss

FOR years, we’ve heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. 

But scientific support for that idea has been surprisingly meagre, and a spate of new research, 18 at several different universities — published in multiple articles in the August issue of The American Jour nal of Clinical Nutrition — could change the way we think about early-hours eating. The largest and most provocative of the studies focused on whether breakfast plays a role in weight loss.

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and other institutions recruited nearly 300 volunteers who were trying to lose weight. They randomly assigned subjects to either skip breakfast, always eat the meal or continue with their current dietary habits. Each group contained people who habitually ate or skipped breakfast at the start, so some changed habits, and others did not. Sixteen weeks later, the volunteers returned to the lab to be weighed. No one had lost much, only a pound or so per person, with weight in all groups unaffected by whether someone ate breakfast or skipped it.