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Could skipping breakfast be good for you?

By Queenie Wong

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

Is that true? A recent study published by Frontiers showed that skipping breakfast could be beneficial.

Skipping breakfast could be a way to force the body to use fat as fuel. Postponing the first meal of the day is a way of doing intermittent fasting.

Tanya Zilberter,  researcher in metabolic diseases with the Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes in Marseille, France, said, “It might be that the duration of the overnight fast matters more than the timing of the first meal of the day.”

For example, a breakfast eater who had an earlier dinner at 7 p.m. followed by breakfast at 10 a.m.. This can be metabolically similar to a breakfast skipper who had a later dinner at the midnight and ate the first meal at 3 p.m.. They both had 15 hours overnight fast.

Intermittent fasting can reduce our appetite so we will take in less food in the middle of the day.

Taking in less calorie was found to have many metabolic benefits including neuroprotective, anti-aging and anti-inflammatory.

But why did we hear many bad things about skipping breakfast?

The study said that the link between skipping breakfast and obesity is “constantly being challenged”. It said that a study published in Japan in 2014 showed that breakfast-skippers had a lower incidence of all diseases comparing to breakfast eaters.

Feature photo: credit to with wind @ flickr

See more at: http://jmsc.hku.hk/reportinghealth2016/2017/04/02/could-skipping-breakfast-be-good-for-you/