Skipping breakfast leads to junk food craving

27 October, 2012

Skipping breakfast primes your brain to seek out unhealthier and higher calorie junk foods, researchers have warned.

DIETERS WHO skip meals often end up gaining weight in the long term, but why this happens is not well understood. Researcher Tony Goldstone, of the MRC Clinical Science Centre at Imperial College London, scanned the brains of people who skipped meals and found mechanisms at work that could help explain the conundrum.

They found that prolonged fasting seemed to prime certain brain regions to gravitate towards higher-calorie foods when the person did eventually find a meal, the Guardian reported. "That makes evolutionary sense if you're in a negative energy-balance situation. You're not going to waste your time going for lettuce," Goldstone said.

This is very much like swinging the pendulam to one side and not expecting it to swing back in the other direction. In other words, if we try miss having a breakfast then chances are that pure habit and hunger might result in a backlash in the long term. Suffice to say that instead of skipping a meal, it is better to manage the content and size of a meal to reduce calorie intake in order to lose weight.