Big Breakfast, Big Calories: Rethink Your Morning “Fuel Up”

Haven’t we all learned that breakfast should be our biggest meal???”Start the day with ‘fuel’ and you can burn it off as the day goes on.” “Eat a big breakfast and you’ll eat fewer calories all day long.”

This advice is probably not true, and in fact a new study published in the??January 17th issue??Nutrition Journal shows that people ate the same at lunch and dinner regardless of what they had at breakfast.??If a person ate 1,000 calories at breakfast??(which is easy to do with bacon, eggs, toast, hashbrowns, and??juice),??he or she??had a total increase in calories eaten throughout the day by 1,000 calories.

This doesn’t mean we should be skipping breakfast.??The problem may be what we historically think of as an “American” breakfast.??It might have worked for the farmer in the past or the laborer hauling lumber, but it’s just too many calories for our current level of activity.

But there’s nothing wrong with a “European” breakfast of whole-grain cereal and fruit.??Or yogurt and fruit.??Or one egg and toast.??Or cheese and bread (whole grain, of course) like the French do it.

What about coffee and a muffin from Starbucks??? The blueberry muffin carries 470 calories, with almost half of them coming??from fat.??The Starbucks coffeecake is a whopping 630 calories. A??tall latte adds another 204 calories (or 90 to 126 calories for a non-fat latte).

If you’re happy with your weight, you can ignore this article because you’ve probably already learned the appropriate caloric intake for your level of activity. But if yor’re one of the millions of readers who are trying to lose weight, this study shows that overweight??people should pay attention to breakfast calories, eating less as a way to reduce total calories for the day.

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