The FastDay Forum

[carorees]

I've been waiting for ages for this study from researchers in Bath (not in the bath!) to publish its results at last. A good study examining a wide range of measurements in people asked to skip or eat breakfast.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4763497/

Some important findings are:

• Hunger hormones are similar at lunchtime even if you skip breakfast
• People who skip breakfast eat more at lunch, but they still consume fewer calories each day
• There were no differences between groups in weight change and most health outcomes
• Insulin sensitivity increased with breakfast relative to fasting (I believe this is due to the phenomenon of physiological insulin resistance that occurs with low carb or fasting, and why it is a good idea always to break your fast with low carb food).

So 16:8 done as eating noon to 8pm, first food eggs and avocado, seems to tick the boxes

Bizarre press release from Bath Uni: http://www.bath.ac.uk/research/news/201 ... ast-study/
Title: Breakfast is key for health says research

[carorees]

Bizarre press release from Bath Uni: http://www.bath.ac.uk/research/news/201 ... ast-study/
Title: Breakfast is key for health says research

Seems that this headline is based on the insulin response to an OGTT. However, if you look at the data (Figure 3 in the full text I linked to below) you'll see that the difference between the two groups is due to 3 of the 9 in the fasting group showing a big increase in insulin response compared with baseline whereas 3 of the 9 in the breakfast group showed a big drop in insulin response compared with baseline, so the results could well have been skewed by these possible outliers. As we don't know the individual case histories we can't know if there were particular reasons why these 6 people responded differently to the remaining 12.

The authors' conclusion is that

In summary, we conclude that neither overall energy intake nor physical activity is different in obese individuals fasting during the morning or consuming a daily breakfast for 6 wk. However, differences in the distribution of physical activity throughout the day were apparent, with lower physical activity during the morning in response to fasting. Resting metabolic rate and blood lipid profiles were not differently affected by breakfast or fasting, although there was some evidence of breakfast omission reducing insulin sensitivity. Furthermore, regular daily breakfast did not facilitate weight loss.

So how they can extrapolate that to the headline is a case of "belief beyond the evidence" I think!

@carorees, did they state if the participants were experienced fasters, or newbies prone to overreacting to a little hunger?

I mean, if they randomly assigned persons to the fasting group who believe they MUST have breakfast (as my friend thinks; he still eats breakfast every day, sigh), it could skew the results. After all, it's possible that those are the people who really do have blood sugar issues (perhaps because they are grazers and sugar burners) and feel weak and tired when fasting/skipping breakfast...or think they do, anyway! Six weeks is barely a fair trial of 5.2, someone would just be settling in from our perspective...