Over the next few weeks, we’ll be posting 10 myths about dieting from the article by Michael Mosley in The Times.
On my first day at medical school a hundred of us gathered in a lecture theatre to be greeted by the Dean. He talked for an hour but there are only two things he said that I still remember. The first was that, based on previous experience, four of us in that room would marry. He was right; I met my future wife that day.
The other thing he said was that while we would learn an enormous amount over the next 5 years, within 10 years of graduating much of what we had learnt would be out of date. Medicine is constantly changing and unless you keep up you are doomed to cling to outmoded ideas.
This is particularly true in the field of human nutrition and dieting. So what are some of the most common and firmly held dieting myths?
Claim 1 Eating breakfast is important if you want to avoid putting on weight.
We are often told that eating a good breakfast is a simple way to control your weight. If you skip breakfast then you will get hungry later in the day and snack on high calorie junk food. Eating breakfast revs up your metabolism, preparing you for the day.
It seems a plausible suggestion but is it true?
There have certainly been plenty of studies which have compared people who skip breakfast with people who don’t and the breakfast eaters are often found to be slimmer and healthier. This could be for the reasons stated above, or it could be that breakfast skippers are generally less healthy individuals and the fact that they are a little bit fatter has little to do with when they decide to break their fast.
One way to test the merits of these claims is to take two groups of people, breakfast skippers and breakfast eaters, and make them swop habits. Get the breakfast skippers to eat breakfast and vica versa.
In a recent study, “The effectiveness of breakfast recommendations on weight loss: a randomized controlled trial”, http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2014/06/04/ajcn.114.089573.abstract, researchers did just that. They got 300 overweight volunteers and asked the breakfast skippers to eat breakfast, while those who routinely ate breakfast were asked to skip breakfast for the duration of the trial.
They weighed the volunteers beforehand and then at the end of 16 weeks. There was high compliance with the new regimes, so what actually happened?
Well, the breakfast skippers who had made themselves eat breakfast lost an average of 0.76kgs. That is not a huge amount, but it is consistent with what breakfast advocates might expect.
Except that the breakfast eaters, who had spent 16 weeks skipping breakfast, lost an almost identical amount, an average of 0.71kgs.
The researchers concluded that, contrary to what is widely believed, a recommendation to eat breakfast “had no discernable effect on weight loss in free-living adults who were attempting to lose weight”.
A similar randomised study done years ago, but with smaller numbers, came to a similar conclusion. The researches thought that making people change their habits was what made the difference, or as they put it “those who had to make the most substantial changes in eating habits to comply with the program achieved best results”.
I like breakfast, it is one of my favourite meals to the day, and I certainly think that children should eat breakfast. If you want to keep fuller for longer then the evidence is clear that you should eat a breakfast that is rich in protein, like eggs, ham or fish, rather than sugary cereals or toast. Protein is more satiating than carbohydrates.
If you are one of those who don’t like eating breakfast and who, perhaps, find that eating breakfast first thing makes you hungrier, then there seems no compelling scientific reasons to do so.
11:45 am
19 Jun 14