Research

Hormonal

In obese adults, daily breakfast consumption improves insulin sensitivity (reduced insulinemic response to glucose) compared to extended morning fasting, despite no change in body weight.

If you are obese, eating breakfast may help your body handle glucose better (lower insulin response) than skipping it, even if your weight doesn't change. This suggests breakfast might have metabolic benefits beyond just energy expenditure.

GoodSupportsMEDIUM confidence
Metabolic/cardiovascular health also did not respond to treatments, except for a reduced insulinemic response to an oral-glucose-tolerance test over time with daily breakfast relative to an increase with daily fasting (P = 0.05).
Enhad A. Chowdhury et al. · American Journal of Clinical Nutrition · 2016

Why this rating

RCT design, statistically significant interaction (P=0.05), though small sample size.

Source

The causal role of breakfast in energy balance and health: a randomized controlled trial in obese adults

Enhad A. Chowdhury et al. · American Journal of Clinical Nutrition · 2016

DOI 10.3945/ajcn.115.122044

rct · n=23Cited 256×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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