How many of these studies used buttered eggs and potato as the sole breakfast?
Study 1: "What to Eat", Specific Demographics, Primary Clinical Trial, Mechanistic/Physiological Outcome, Conclusion: High-Protein breakfast is superior for suppressing appetite and maintaining satiety, while a High-Fiber breakfast promotes better weight loss and a healthier gut microbiome,
Study 2: Whether to Eat, Broad Demographics, Systematic Review (meta analysis), Broad Clinical Outcomes, Conclusion: eating breakfast increases total daily energy intake compared to skipping it, and that skipping breakfast resulted in slightly greater weight loss.
Who in their own mind decided that this is a "study" worth publishing?
You read
We saw this effect, so it's real.
We saw this effect in a small study, so it's worth doing a larger study.
There are trade offs in either case and some types of research where one is more suitable than the other. But the best case is a combination of the two, and it's exceedingly rare.
Maybe there are other options but this seems to be the polar nature of these studies from what I've seen.
Some points though:
- A within-participants study has inherently more power than a between-subjects study. Trying two different diets with the same person removes a lot of variables that you'd need to control for in between-subjects studies (and yes, they randomized the order of intervention and found no difference based on order)
- It looks like this was conducted in a way that supported compliance with the protocol, and using analysis techniques that would be unwieldy for a much larger sample size.
Even with N=19, the reported significance is very compelling.
For example if I have a bag full of thousands of coins, pull out 19 at random and flip them sequentially, and they all come out heads I'm going to conclude I have a bag that is overwhelmingly coins that are heavily biased toward coming up heads.
Are you going to say my sample size was too small to support that conclusion?
To see if their sample size was too small you need to at least read the part where they do the math.
Countries known for light or skipped breakfasts: France, Japan, China.
I think I'll wait for a more thorough study.
It was high fiber big breakfast vs high protein big breakfast.
(And no, this comment was not written by an LLM).
If they used crossover design they should have all participants go through a second trial period where they consume the same diet but with light breakfast and more caloric lunch and dinner. Then they could actually have more insight on the main thesis of their study, i.e. whether bug breakfast alters appetite.
This study shows or proves absolutely nothing about advantages or disadvantages of big breakfast or that a big breakfast makes any difference whatsoever.
It only shows that if you are going to have a big breakfast as part of calorie limited diet if you choose a diet with high protein you will lose weight slightly faster but will have slightly worse gut health than if you chose a diet with high fructose.
The study has a pretty small sample size, but it seems well designed and matches what you'd expect.
I'll see myself out.