Proving that breakfast may indeed be the most important meal of the day, a group of researchers say their work shows that people dealing with diabetes or obesity can lose weight by including a healthy breakfast in their daily routine. 

The research included a subset of patients from the public access dataset Look AHEAD that compared intensive lifestyle intervention (ILI) to diabetes support and education (DSE) control in overweight or obese adults with type 2 diabetes. As part of the research, a self-reported questionnaire collected breakfast consumption frequency (BCF) data over seven days across four years of the intervention. 

In results published in Circulation, the researchers noted that every one day increase in the average BCF was associated with an additional 0.43% weight loss in the ILI group (p=0.002), but not in the DSE arm (β-coefficient 0.04% weight loss; p=0.73; p-interaction for arm x BCF=0.01). The connection between eating breakfast and weight loss was similar even after adjusting for daily caloric intake (p=0.04) but not after adjusting for physical activity (p=0.16). 

The researchers said further work should look at the relationship between eating breakfast and “other weight loss behaviors.”