Twice as High Diet-Induced Thermogenesis After Breakfast vs. Dinner | Hacker News Reader

Twice as High Diet-Induced Thermogenesis After Breakfast vs. Dinner

academic.oup.com

83 pointsprostoalex49 comments

I don't mean to be negative but this is another useless nutrition paper. It shows effects we already know about, and it doesn't show them in more convincing ways than previous studies, and it then it misinterprets the relevance of these results for a headline.

You can't get anything useful if you focus the entire window on the post prandial. The body is complex and caloric balancing is not a simple thing. Studies that focus on appropriate (24 hrs+) periods of time never measure any difference. Not only that their own study showed that:

> Low-calorie breakfast increased feelings of hunger (P < .001), specifically appetite for sweets (P = .007), in the course of the day.

So for many people who don't eat a large breakfast your compliance is going to be impacted. Anyone familiar with nutritional science will tell you that compliance is a much bigger deal than eeking out tiny theoretical shifts in calories by shifting meal times, which even if you could prove were real would absolutely not be worth it if it broke your overall compliance.

Outside of that, this isn't a novel finding. We already have small pilot studies showing this stuff that have the same problems. Repeated science is often underrated, but these results are uncontroversial, they are just over interpreted and old.

> Extensive breakfasting should therefore be preferred over large dinner meals to prevent obesity and high blood glucose peaks even under conditions of a hypocaloric diet.

Like, sorry, no that's absolutely not a fair conclusion of these results. It's just not.

> I don't mean to be negative but this is another useless nutrition paper. It shows effects we already know about

So I'm going to put you in the "nay" camp regarding the importance of reproducibility[0] in science? Kind of funny that half the time nutritional science gets criticized because it isn't reproduced/reproducible enough and the other half because it is "useless" to reproduce the same findings. Cannot win.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility#Reproducible_r...

Did you read my entire comment? Feel like I addressed this here:

> We already have small pilot studies showing this stuff that have the same problems. Repeated science is often underrated, but these results are uncontroversial, they are just over interpreted and old.

In general I am strongly in favor of reproducing science, this study doesn't really test anything helpful for either outcome though.

The more important part of the introductory comment was "then it misinterprets the relevance of these results for a headline."

The effect is known, and known to be insignificant. Generating headlines for reproducing a known insignificant effect is not helpful.

You're right about the importance of reproduction!

But that doesn't mean a study simply confirming established science should be presented as dramatic news.

If they skipped the "misinterpret the relevance of results for a headline" maybe they would have gotten a friendlier reception.

To add to your comment, they measure calorie expenditure throughout the day but seemingly stop collecting data throughout the night (23:00 to 7:00). Their conclusion that breakfast is better isn't because they compared the data from the day to night, but because they didn't have any data throughout the night.

Maybe I'm stretching this, but I want more calorie expenditure while I'm sleeping and having the highest amount of somatotropin in my body so it can mobilize proteins and facilitate healing.

Your compliance point is salient. I can recommend every single therapy in the book, but getting a patient to take a drug let alone at the correct time and correct dosage to maintain therapeutic index, is an art.

Exactly, this stuff needs to be monitored either intensely for 24 hours (or maybe even longer), or periodically for longer periods of time (days, weeks, months). What they did doesn't really give us useful data other than "directionally this is an area for more investigation."

Agree. I’ve been doing TRF for a couple years now by skipping breakfast. I’ve had great results and compliance is relatively easy. Even if there are some additional benefits by skipping dinner instead, I would never to be able to remain complaint.

With that said, my largest meal of the is usually lunch, and it’s the meal I’ll include carbs if I’m including them that day. Dinner is usually protein and veggies.

I got the idea somewhere that it makes a huge difference if you engage in 20 minutes or so of light activity after every meal rather than sitting or lying down. Some paper even suggested it makes a significant difference in calories burned, not because the exercise burns a lot of calories per se, but because it keeps your body in a mode of processing food reasonably quickly in order to be prepared for physical activity.

> Anyone familiar with nutritional science will tell you that compliance is a much bigger deal than eeking out tiny theoretical shifts in calories by shifting meal times, which even if you could prove were real would absolutely not be worth it if it broke your overall compliance.

Hear, hear. It's like with reducing our carbon footprint by becoming vegetarian vs just reducing meat consumption - the former is more often than not abandoned after a few years.

Aligns with many recent studies on better insulin sensitivity in the AM, and showing how early meals help sync internal circadian clocks (there is one central and many peripheral).

"Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper."

P.S.: If you practice time-restricted eating (intermittent fasting), it's better to skip dinner than to skip breakfast.

| "Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper."

Sadly this is the exact opposite of how I prefer to eat :/

Excluding the occasional Saturday mornings when I enjoy making a big breakfast of waffles, pouched eggs, etc for family/friends. Those are great, but for the most part mornings I’m ready to get on with the day and don’t want to spend time over a stove.

Same here, in fact I'm so not used to having breakfast that any time I try to I have awful nausea.

Dinner time, after work and chores is the best time to cook, eat, socialise and take our time enjoying some food.

These anecdotes are interesting. While they might fly in the face of science, they provide strong evidence that there is no one size fits all.

The biggest issue with almost any kind of diet is that it takes gargantuan force of will to actually stick to. So I think that if one finds any kind of healthy (calorie and macro-nutrient-wise) eating regimen that they can follow, better not trying finding something else on the premise that it might be more effective.

> I'm so not used to having breakfast that any time I try to I get an awful nausea.

This is likely just force of habit. Force yourself to eat something light - just a yoghurt or a piece of fruit - in the morning for a few days, and the nausea will likely go away.

I might force myself, or just keep doing what feels best :-)

After all, if one needs to lose weight there are many more effective tools than just forcing oneself to have breakfast.

My intent is not to convince you to do anything, rather to point out that "I never do X and feel bad when I do X" shouldn't lead one to the conclusion "doing X is bad for me".

> better insulin sensitivity in the AM

I think it's more accurate to say "After a fast" .

Next study needs to shift these windows by 6 hours. I suspect it will show nothing to do with circadian rhythm and everything to do with fasting/non-fasted eating.

I don’t think After a Fast” is accurate in the context. ‘In the AM” is referring to the Dawn Phenomenon[0], isn’t it?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_phenomenon

I'm lazy to dig it up, but there was a study comparing people skipping breakfast and skipping dinner. The conclusion was the insulin sensitivity was higher from AM - to early PM (breakfast + lunch), than from early PM - evening (lunch + dinner).

It may be more effective to do time-restricted eating with no dinner, but for many people (with kids, for example), this is not practical. I've done 17/7 for about a year with good success, usually from 7p to noon. It allows me to eat dinner with my small kids, and that has made it feasible for my family.

I've not done 17/7 or 16/8, but I've done 1/0, i.e. alternate day fasting for quite a while. Compatibility with social life aside, I find it much harder to sleep after not having eaten for 24 hours, and it didn't get significantly easier to fall asleep after a few months. My sleep would also be lighter, so I'd wake up more often from some random noise.

I don't know how much this plays a role in 17/7 etc, but if it does, skipping dinner might make sticking to it harder than skipping breakfast.

Also "Eat your breakfast, share your lunch with a friend and give your dinner to your enemy."

Study group consisted of 16 people. Anecdotal results at best, sorry.

Study group consisted of 16 men and 0 women.

Absolutely right!

Also "normal-weighted" is a pretty bad standard, cause that "criteria" is easily flawed.

In Germany there is an old saying that goes "Eat breakfast like an emperor, lunch like a king, and dinner like a beggar." Isn't that roughly what the paper concluded?

There is a video here by an M.D. who sells nothing but books on nutrition and donates the profits to charity; the page includes links to all the papers he cites https://nutritionfacts.org/video/chronobiology-how-circadian...

So now intermittent fasting is stupid? or we should reverse the fasting period to evenings instead of mornings?

Intermittent fasting has never been about specific times of eating. There are a number of versions, eat two days, fast for one, eat in the day, fast in the evening etc, but the idea is in the name, not the times. This research is interesting insight but it doesn't conflict with the core principle behind intermittent fasting in any way.

You'll notice another way to interpret the results is post fasting eating induces more thermogenesis.

Anecdotally, I have experienced this no matter when I break my fast, I get hot shortly afterwards. Whether it's breakfast, lunch or dinner times.

Are you overweight?

If not, why would you worry about this?

If you are, you need to experiment a lot and find what works for you in any case, as your personal variables may very well overshadow any effects from this paper.

Do what works for you. I get very ill by mid-morning if I skip breakfast. But I'm not especially hungry at dinner time. It's much easier for me to skip dinner.

Uh oh, sounds like you're getting redpilled. Please keep fasting, and buy my 1 on 1 coaching sessions.

Any layman's explanation of health implications?

I'm not a doctor but if I'm reading it correctly they did a study with 16 normal weight males and found that when eating in the morning their blood glucose and insulin concentrations[1] were lower after breakfast compared to dinner regardless of calorie consumption.

So eat more in the morning and less at night.

[1]https://www.endocrineweb.com/conditions/diabetes/normal-regu...

This is a problem. No study should be male only. It creates a gender bias in scientific evidence: There are metabolic difference between males and females.

It's not a problem, it's just incomplete. From what I've seen, most studies (especially with animals) start out with only male participants, to eliminate the effect of menstruation and the related hormones, which we've seen can be very potent.

This makes it easier on the researchers trying to conduct a preliminary study. The limitations of the study just mean we can't necessarily generalize the results to both men and women, people of different weights, (nor, I suspect, people of various races,) or even, given the sample size, all men of normal weight.

But first we see if we can detect an effect in "normal weight" males, and then we have doubts about its applicability in other populations we test those populations. This of course isn't the most thorough way of experimentation, but it's the biggest bang for your buck when your resources and/or available subject pool are limited.

> to eliminate the effect of menstruation and the related hormones, which we've seen can be very potent.

Interesting, never considered this.

>No study should be male only.

Actually it's better to have the data separated (or parameterized by gender). Just dont take the advice of a male only study/data if you're not male.

This also applies to genetic/racial background which is particularly challenging due to non-binary nature (eg, what percent irish are you? I bet its >0)

ideally there

It's a result specific to males. That's not inherently bad. Studies are easier to do with variables like that limited, and a higher sample size of clearer data can be better than 20 people broken down into 5 men, 5 women, 5 kids..

Is "normal weight" less of a problem? Do such studies usually generalize to overweight males better than to females?

The sample has serious flaws and is quite unrepresentative of the population:

>We examined a group of 16 healthy young men (age 23.6 ± 2.3 years) with a normal body mass index (22.5 ± 1.1 kg/m2)

Size, demographic, gender, and BMI are all seemingly within the same cohort. I have seen neurological studies with an n=8 be the predicates of clinical practice because that's what the patient population on the East coast is, but this could have been expanded.

When looking at the results section, it looks like the data lines up almost inversely. Where if you have a high calorie meal in the morning you'll burn more calories throughout the day whereas eating at night you'll burn more calories at night. But they didn't measure calorie consumption from 23:00 to 7:00 so we have no idea what the measured consumption is.

Maybe I'm naive, but every time I talk to one of my colleagues with a PhD in nutrition they constantly say the same recommendations: eat a diverse diet free of sugar, try to avoid salt and red meat, and get your fiber. Meal timing has been shown to be more for the mind that for your health, in that it doesn't matter when you eat, how much you eat, but you eat correctly. I'll get off my soap box now.

>Extensive breakfasting should therefore be preferred over large dinner meals to prevent obesity and high blood glucose peaks even under conditions of a hypocaloric diet.

So, breakfast like a king, dinner like a prince and supper like a peasant.

Why are nutrition and social studies considered science?

They chart out a few numbers for very few people; have no understanding or analysis of the underling biological or biochemical processes. The later of which is hard, grungy and boring science - but that's really the important high order bit.

This is hack territory. It's the easiest science with very low bar, but at some point we have stop this madness.

So.. Don't psych yourself out if you have a high body temperature after breakfast?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com