We have been told over and over again that you need to eat heartily at breakfast, and lightly in the evening. But in fact, it’s simpler than that. When we eat more at breakfast, we tend to eat less later in the day because we are less hungry. What should you eat for breakfast to be healthy? This is a scientific question that researchers have just answered. Details from Mathilde Fontez, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon.
franceinfo :pbreakfast hearty or light, finally, it does not matter, Mathilde?
Mathilde Fontez: Doesn’t matter! The discovery of the researchers is that a calorie is a calorie. It has the same effect on us, it feeds us the same, whatever the time of day.
However, we hear a lot that breakfast is the time to eat, so as not to gain weight…
Yes. And that’s not just common sense advice. Several studies seemed to show that you gain less weight with morning calories than with evening ones. We had even seen in the laboratory that when mice and rats were fed a high-fat diet during the day – whereas they are nocturnal animals that normally eat at night – they quickly became obese.
As if the time at which we eat had an influence on the effect of food. And there are also all these studies on the micro-young, which show that we take better advantage of food if we eat at certain times of the day, and not at others: that we set up periods of several hours of abstinence…
And there were biological explanations for that?
Precisely, the researchers could not get their hands on a mechanism that explains why a calorie makes you more or less fat depending on the moment. There were assumptions: does the metabolism change throughout the day? Is it a matter of physical activity? Energy expenditure? Is it our circadian rhythm, this biological clock that plays?
These are the hypotheses that a team of English biologists decided to test, for the first time in a truly objective way: they implemented a very strict protocol: the people who took part in the study followed a totally controlled diet. . Basically, they all ate exactly the same thing – drinks and meals: everything was provided by the laboratory. Only the hours of the day changed.
And the result, then, is that there is no difference?
That’s it. The researchers demonstrate that the use of calories does not vary with time of day. So we can eat as we prefer: a big breakfast in the morning, or a big dinner in the evening, it doesn’t change anything. There is no delicate and complex mechanism that eliminates croissants in the morning better than fries in the evening. It’s a cliché that falls. As for the differences observed in previous studies, they would be explained quite simply by our behavior: when we eat well in the morning, we are less hungry during the day, and we therefore tend to eat less.