Eating Breakfast Does Not Improve Metabolism, Study Finds

Skipping breakfast is one form of intermittent fasting in which you restrict your daily eating to a specific window of time, say between 11am and 7pm, as an example. This type of eating schedule typically does promote weight loss—but what you eat is another important factor.

This is especially true if you're severely overweight and eat a standard American processed food diet. Many people find that eating breakfast leads to feeling hungry again soon thereafter, which can lead to unnecessary snacking. This is reflected in another recent study4 into the metabolic effects of eating or skipping breakfast.

As reported by Time Magazine

"...contrary to popular belief, having breakfast every day was not tied to an improvement in metabolism. Prior thought—supported by research—has shown that eating early in the day can prevent people from overeating later out of hunger, and it boosts their metabolism early. The new study which examined causal links between breakfast habits and energy balance couldn't prove that."

The study found that eating breakfast was linked to a greater overall dietary energy intake. And again, the type of foods you eat for breakfast may be the key ingredient that is being overlooked in this type of research—both past and present. Typically, you will find that eating a carbohydrate-rich breakfast will tend to make you hungry again far sooner than a low-carb, high-fat breakfast will. The reason for this is because if your body is using sugar as its primary fuel, it will need a "refill" at regular intervals, as sugar is a very fast-burning fuel.

Fat, on the other hand, is a slow-burning fuel, allowing you to feel satiated longer, and the more important fact is that you have loads more fat available than sugar stored as glycogen in your muscles and liver. While glycogen stores will only last for less than a day, your fat store can last for weeks. In addition to that, eating first thing in the morning also coincides with your circadian cortisol peak, which has an exaggerated impact on your insulin secretion. When you eat during this time, it leads to a rapid and large insulin release and a corresponding rapid drop in blood sugar levels, more so than when you eat at other times of the day.

If you're healthy, your blood sugar level won't drop dangerously low (such as can occur with hypoglycemia) but they can drop low enough to make you feel hungry again, even though you recently ate. This effect is amplified when eating a carbohydrate-rich breakfast, such as pancakes, muffins, cereal, or bread, with a large glass of juice for example.

Intermittent Fasting and Low-Carb Diet – A Powerful Combo

If you're obese or severely overweight, I believe the first thing that you should do is to cut back on your overall sugar and grain consumption. I highly recommend keeping your total sugar or fructose intake below 25 grams a day, or as little as 15 grams a day if you have any health problems related to insulin and leptin resistance, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, or heart disease, until your insulin-leptin sensitivity has been restored.

Fructose is particularly troublesome, as it triggers a key enzyme, fructokinase, which in turn activates another enzyme that causes your cells to accumulate fat. This is especially true if you are overweight, but far less of an issue if you aren't. Likewise, grains also break down into sugar in your body, thereby promoting insulin and leptin resistance just like other sugars, which in turn promotes obesity and makes losing weight a real struggle.

After getting rid of sugar in your diet, you can take your weight loss efforts further by practicing intermittent fasting and exercising in a fasted state. The simplest way to get started is to skip breakfast, make lunch the first meal of your day, and have your dinner no later than 7PM or at least three hours before you hit the sack. I typically suggest sticking to this type of eating schedule, however for those who have schedules that do not allow this, eating breakfast and skipping dinner is an acceptable alternative.

The general rule is to limit your eating to a specific and narrow window of time each day (about six to eight hours), instead of eating every two to three hours all throughout the day. By providing ample amount of time in fasting, your body empties its glycogen stores, which rarely happens when you're eating three times a day, and turns on its natural fat-burning mode.

Warning: I strongly advise against fasting without your doctor's consent if you are hypoglycemic, living with chronic stress, have cortisol dysregulation, or have an existing medical condition. Pregnant women or nursing mothers are also not good candidates for any type of fasting, as babies need generous amounts of nutrients before and after birth.

Top Breakfast Myths – Debunked!

The belief that breakfast is the most important meal of the day is now a thing of the past, as mounting research continues to support the benefits of intermittent fasting, a dietary pattern that promotes longer bouts of fasting by limiting your food intake to a specific timeframe.

Here are some common breakfast misconceptions that were proven incorrect by a study from the University of Alabama, Birmingham:

• Eating breakfast helps you lose weight – In an effort to find out whether eating or not eating breakfast truly had an impact on weight loss, researchers divided 309 overweight and obese but otherwise healthy adults into two random groups. Some were told to eat breakfast, while the others were told to skip it. After 16 weeks, the researchers found no difference in weight loss between the groups. 
  
  In essence, it didn't matter if they ate breakfast or not. However, it's important to note that they didn't control the food intake of the participants involved. The reason why there may be no significant weight loss between the two groups is that all of them may have been eating a standard American diet – refined carbs and processed fructose – which hinders your body from effectively burning fat.
• Eating breakfast improves your metabolism – In an article by Time magazine, it was revealed that eating your breakfast regularly does not improve your metabolism. Disputing the previous notion that eating breakfast will actually prevent you from overeating later in the day because their metabolism was boosted earlier, many people find that eating breakfast leads to feeling hungry again soon afterwards, which can lead to unnecessary snacking.
  
  Again, this may have something to do with the type of food the participants in the said study were eating. Typically, you will find that eating a carbohydrate-rich breakfast will make you hungry again far sooner than a low-carb, high-fat breakfast will. The reason for this is that if your body is using sugar as its primary fuel, it will need a "refill" at regular intervals, as sugar is a very fast-burning fuel.

How Intermittent Fasting Benefits Your Brain

Your brain can also benefit from intermittent fasting. As reported in the featured article:

"Mattson has also researched the protective benefits of fasting to neurons. If you don't eat for 10–16 hours, your body will go to its fat stores for energy, and fatty acids called ketones will be released into the bloodstream. This has been shown to protect memory and learning functionality, says Mattson, as well as slow disease processes in the brain."

Besides releasing ketones as a byproduct of burning fat, intermittent fasting also affects brain function by boosting production of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Mattson's research suggests that fasting every other day (restricting your meal on fasting days to about 600 calories), tends to boost BDNF by anywhere from 50 to 400 percent, depending on the brain region. BDNF activates brain stem cells to convert into new neurons, and triggers numerous other chemicals that promote neural health. This protein also protects your brain cells from changes associated with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

BDNF also expresses itself in the neuro-muscular system where it protects neuro-motors from degradation. (The neuromotor is the most critical element in your muscle. Without the neuromotor, your muscle is like an engine without ignition. Neuro-motor degradation is part of the process that explains age-related muscle atrophy.) So BDNF is actively involved in both your muscles and your brain, and this cross-connection, if you will, appears to be a major part of the explanation for why a physical workout can have such a beneficial impact on your brain tissue — and why the combination of intermittent fasting with high intensity exercise appears to be a particularly potent combination.

Intermittent Fasting Is as Good or Better Than Continuous Calorie Restriction

According to Dr. Stephen Freedland, associate professor of urology and pathology at the Duke University Medical Center, "undernutrition without malnutrition" is the only experimental approach that consistently improves survival in animals with cancer, as well as extends lifespan overall by as much as 30 percent. 

Interestingly enough, intermittent fasting appears to provide nearly identical health benefits without being as difficult to implement and maintain. It's easier for most people to simply restrict their eating to a narrow window of time each day, opposed to dramatically decreasing their overall daily calorie intake.

Mark Mattson, senior investigator for the National Institute on Aging, which is part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), has researched the health benefits of intermittent fasting, as well as the benefits of calorie restriction. According to Mattson, there are several theories to explain why fasting works:

"The one that we've studied a lot, and designed experiments to test, is the hypothesis that during the fasting period, cells are under a mild stress, and they respond to the stress adaptively by enhancing their ability to cope with stress and, maybe, to resist disease... There is considerable similarity between how cells respond to the stress of exercise and how cells respond to intermittent fasting."

In one of his studies, overweight adults with moderate asthma lost eight percent of their body weight by cutting their calorie intake by 80 percent on alternate days for eight weeks. Markers of oxidative stress and inflammation also decreased, and asthma-related symptoms improved, along with several quality-of-life indicators.

More recently, Mattson and colleagues compared the effectiveness of intermittent fasting against continuous calorie restriction for weight loss, insulin sensitivity and other metabolic disease risk markers. The study, published in the International Journal of Obesity in 2011, found that intermittent fasting was as effective as continuous calorie restriction for improving all of these issues, and slightly better for reducing insulin resistance. According to the authors:

"Both groups experienced comparable reductions in leptin, free androgen index, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, total and LDL cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure and increases in sex hormone binding globulin, IGF binding proteins 1 and 2. Reductions in fasting insulin and insulin resistance were modest in both groups, but greater with IER [intermittent fasting] than with CER [continuous energy restriction]."

The Health Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

Aside from removing your cravings for sugar and snack foods and turning you into an efficient fat-burning machine, thereby making it far easier to maintain a healthy body weight, modern science has confirmed there are many other good reasons to fast intermittently. For example, research presented at the 2011 annual scientific sessions of the American College of Cardiology in New Orleans, showed that fasting triggered a 1,300 percent rise of human growth hormone (HGH) in women, and an astounding 2,000 percent in men.

HGH, human growth hormone, commonly referred to as "the fitness hormone," plays an important role in maintaining health, fitness and longevity, including promotion of muscle growth, and boosting fat loss by revving up your metabolism. The fact that it helps build muscle while simultaneously promoting fat loss explains why HGH helps you lose weight without sacrificing muscle mass, and why even athletes can benefit from the practice (as long as they don't overtrain and are careful about their nutrition). The only other thing that can compete in terms of dramatically boosting HGH levels is high-intensity interval training. Other health benefits of intermittent fasting include:

✔ Normalizing your insulin and leptin sensitivity, which is key for optimal health
✔ Improving biomarkers of disease
✔ Normalizing ghrelin levels, also known as "the hunger hormone"
✔ Lowering triglyceride levels
✔ Reducing inflammation and lessening free radical damage
✔ Preserving memory functioning and learning