Want to exercise? Eat your breakfast first

Eating breakfast before exercise increases the speed at which we digest, absorb and metabolise carbohydrate that we may eat after exercise.

Photograph: Kind courtesy Shweta Mehta/Instagram

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day and eating it before exercising may 'prep' the body to burn carbohydrates during exercise and more rapidly digest food after working out.

Scientists from the University of Bath's department for Health studied the effect of eating breakfast versus fasting overnight before an hour's cycling.

In a control test, breakfast was followed by three hours' rest.

The volunteers at a breakfast were made to eat porridge with milk, two hours before exercise.

Post-exercise or rest, the researchers tested the blood glucose levels and muscle glycogen levels of the 12 healthy male volunteers who took part.

They discovered that eating breakfast increased the rate at which the body burned carbohydrates during exercise, as well as increasing the rate the body digested and metabolised food eaten after exercise too.

Senior lecturer in the Department of Health who co-led the study, Dr Javier Gonzalez said,"This is the first study to examine the ways in which breakfast before exercise influences our responses to meals after exercise."

Gonzalez added, "We found that, compared to skipping breakfast, eating breakfast before exercise increases the speed at which we digest, absorb and metabolise carbohydrate that we may eat after exercise."

This study suggests that, at least after a single bout of eating breakfast before exercise may 'prime' our body and make it ready for rapid storage of nutrition when we eat meals after exercise.

An interesting aspect of this research is that it shows that extrapolating from other studies conducted on people who fast, which is common in metabolism experiments, may not be reliable, as being fed alters metabolism.

"We also found that breakfast before exercise increases carbohydrate burning during exercise and that this carbohydrate wasn't just coming from the breakfast that was just eaten, but also from carbohydrate stored in our muscles as glycogen," said Rob Edinburgh, a PhD student in the Department for Health who co-led the study.

The full findings are present in the American Journal of Physiology: Endocrinology and Metabolism.