I’ve got some great news for you.  The age-old maxim “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper” may in fact be the best advice to follow to prevent metabolic syndrome, according to a new University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) study. Great news for our kitchens, and great news for those of you at bartlett mitchell who love to tuck into a bacon buttie or sausage sarnie!

The research, carried out on mice, found that fat intake at the time of waking seems to turn on fat metabolism very efficiently and also turns on the ability to respond to different types of food later in the day. When the animals were fed carbohydrates upon waking, carbohydrate metabolism was turned on and seemed to stay on even when eating different kinds of food later in the day.

“The first meal you have appears to program your metabolism for the rest of the day,” said study senior author Martin Young, Ph.D., “This study suggests that if you ate a carbohydrate-rich breakfast it would promote carbohydrate utilisation throughout the rest of the day, whereas, if you have a fat-rich breakfast, you have metabolic plasticity to transfer your energy utilization between carbohydrate and fat.”  I thought I’d give you the direct quote as words like ‘Plasticity’ aren’t really me!!

“Humans eat a mixed diet, and our study, which we have repeated four times in animals, seems to show that if you really want to be able to efficiently respond to mixed meals across a day then a meal in higher fat content in the morning is a good thing,” Dr Bray said. “Another important component of our study is that, at the end of the day, the mice ate a low-caloric density meal, and we think that combination is key to the health benefits we’ve seen.”

The doctors said further research needs to test whether similar observations are made with different types of dietary fats and carbohydrates, and it needs to be tested in humans to see if the findings are similar between rodents and humans.

I have to say, whilst reading this research I just can't get the picture of these mice waking up every morning, switching on The Today programme, and tucking into a full blown English brekkie: eggs, bacon, sausage, black pudding, fried bread, mushrooms and beans... It's good to know some research on animals sounds amazing!