Dessert With Breakfast Helps Weight Loss: What the Study Actually Found
A study published in the journal Steroids in 2012 and conducted by researchers at Tel Aviv University made a somewhat counterintuitive claim that generated significant popular press coverage: eating dessert with breakfast, as part of a larger high-calorie morning meal, might actually help with long-term weight loss compared to a low-calorie breakfast that avoided sweets.
The study followed nearly two hundred clinically obese adults over sixteen weeks. Both groups consumed the same number of total daily calories. One group ate a 300-calorie breakfast; the other ate a 600-calorie breakfast that included a sweet item — chocolate, a cookie, or cake. At the sixteen-week mark, both groups had lost similar amounts of weight. Over the following twenty weeks, however, the low-carb, low-calorie breakfast group regained most of the weight they had lost, while the high-calorie breakfast group continued to lose weight and maintained their losses.
The researchers' proposed mechanism was largely about hunger and craving management. A larger breakfast that includes something sweet may more effectively satisfy the desire for sweets throughout the day, reducing the likelihood of caving to those cravings later when willpower is depleted. A breakfast that leaves you feeling deprived may set up a pattern of compensatory eating that undoes the caloric restriction achieved in the morning.
The study had significant limitations — it was relatively small, of limited duration, and conducted in a specific population. Nutrition researchers noted that it was a single study, not replication-tested, and that drawing strong conclusions from it about optimal breakfast composition would be premature.
The popular coverage, predictably, focused on the "eat cake for breakfast, lose weight" hook rather than the caveats. The study was genuine; the headline version of it was considerably more confident than the underlying evidence warranted.
Study: Daniela Jakubowicz et al., "Meal timing and composition influence ghrelin levels, appetite scores and weight loss maintenance in overweight and obese adults," Steroids, March 2012 (ScienceDaily summary).
General information only — not medical advice. Talk to a dietitian or physician before changing your diet.
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