Loma Linda Study Links Big Breakfasts to Weight Loss
July 17, 2017: A new study by Loma Linda University School of Public Health and the Czech Republic provides evidence that a large breakfast, no snacking and a light dinner are a winning combination for weight loss.
The study involved 50,000 participants. Results showed that timing and frequency of meals played a large role in weight loss.
According to Dr. Hana Kahleova, one of the study’s authors, the results prove that there is truth to the saying, “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”
Kahleova said that weight loss results were even better when dinner was completely skipped.
She said data rejects the popular theory that frequent smaller meals lead to weight loss, telling Riverside County’s Press-Enterprise that frequent snacks actually led to higher caloric intake.
In contrast, eating a large meal of 2000 calories in one sitting was less likely to result in weight gain than spreading the same caloric intake out over several snacks.
When the study was conducted, Kahleova was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Loma Linda University School of Public Health.
Kahleova is currently director of clinical research for Washington, D.C.’s Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
She is on sabbatical from the Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine in Prague, Czech Republic, as a postdoctoral research fellow and diabetes physician.
The paper was coauthored by Gary Fraser, a professor in the LLU schools of Medicine and Public Health.
Published online last week, the paper is titled “Meal frequency and timing are associated with Body Mass Index in the Adventist Health Study-2.”
The Journal of Nutrition will also carry the article in September.
Grants from the National Cancer Institute, the World Cancer Research Fund, and the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic supported the study.
