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BACON OR BAGELS?
HIGHER FAT AT BREAKFAST MAY BE
HEALTHIER THAN YOU THINK!
T
he age-old maxim “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch
like a prince and dinner like a pauper” may in fact be
the best advice to follow to prevent metabolic
syndrome, according to a new University of Alabama
at Birmingham (UAB) study. Metabolic syndrome is
characterized by abdominal obesity, high triglycerides,
insulin resistance and other cardiovascular disease-risk
factors.
The study, published online March 30 in the International
Journal of Obesity, examined the influence exerted by the
type of foods and specific timing of intake on the
development of metabolic syndrome characteristics in mice.
The UAB research revealed that mice fed a meal higher in
fat after waking had normal metabolic profiles. In contrast,
mice that ate a more carbohydrate-rich diet in the morning
and consumed a high-fat meal at the end of the day saw
increased weight gain, adiposity, glucose intolerance and
other markers of the metabolic syndrome.
“Studies have looked at the type and quantity of food intake,
but nobody has undertaken the question of whether the
timing of what you eat and when you eat it influences body
weight, even though we know sleep and altered circadian
rhythms influence body weight,” said the study’s lead author
Molly Bray, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology in the UAB
School of Public Health.
Bray said the research team found that fat
intake at the time of waking seems to turn
on fat metabolism very efficiently and also
turns on the animal’s ability to respond
to different types of food later in the day.
When the animals were fed carbohydrates
upon waking, carbohydrate metabolism was turned on and
seemed to stay on even when the animal was eating
different kinds of food later in the day.
“The first meal you have appears to program your
metabolism for the rest of the day,” said study senior author
Martin Young, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine in the
UAB Division of Cardiovascular Disease. “This study suggests
that if you ate a carbohydrate-rich breakfast it would
promote carbohydrate utilization throughout the rest of the
day, whereas, if you have a fat-rich breakfast, you have
metabolic plasticity to transfer your energy utilization
between carbohydrate and fat.”
Bray and Young said the implications of this research are
important for human dietary recommendations. Humans
rarely eat a uniform diet throughout the day and need the
ability to respond to alterations in diet quality. Adjusting
dietary composition of a given meal is an important
component in energy balance, and they said their findings
suggest that recommendations for weight reduction and/or
maintenance should include information about the timing of
dietary intake plus the quality and quantity of intake.
“Humans eat a mixed diet, and our study, which we have
repeated four times in animals, seems to show that if you
really want to be able to
efficiently respond to mixed
meals across a day then a
meal in higher fat content in
the morning is a good thing,”
Bray said. “Another important
component of our study is
that, at the end of the day,
the mice ate a low-caloric
density meal, and we think
that combination is key to the
health benefits we’ve seen.”
Bray and Young said
further research needs to test
whether similar observations
are made with different
types of dietary fats and
carbohydrates, and it needs to be tested in
humans to see if the findings are similar between
rodents and humans.
“We’re also working on a study right now to
determine if these feeding regimens adversely
affect heart function,” Young said.
Reference:
Bray et al. Time-of-day-dependent dietary fat
consumption influences multiple cardiometabolic
syndrome parameters in mice. International Journal of
Obesity, 2010; DOI: 10.1038/ijo.2010.63
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