Breakfast is often called the most important meal of the day but scientists have found when it comes to losing weight, men and women should make very different choices.
Men looking to lose weight should opt for high-carb breakfast items like bread, oats and grains, while women are better off eating higher-fat breakfasts, such as omelets or avocados, according to a new paper in the journal, Computers in Biology and Medicine.
The research shows that men and women can lose weight more easily if they eat these higher-carb/higher-fat meals after fasting for several hours, for example overnight.
“Lifestyle is a big factor in our overall health,” said study co-author Stéphanie Abo, a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo, Canada.
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“We live busy lives, so it’s important to understand how seemingly inconsequential decisions, such as what to have for breakfast, can affect our health and energy levels.
“Whether attempting to lose weight, maintain weight, or just keep up your energy, understanding your diet’s impact on your metabolism is important,” Abo said.
The researchers describe in the paper how they created a “a sex-specific, whole-body metabolic model for feeding and fasting scenarios in healthy young adults,” which modeled how men’s and women’s bodies metabolize the nutrients in meals, particularly carbs and fats.
“We often have less research data on women’s bodies than on men’s bodies,” said Anita Layton, a professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo.
“By building mathematical models based on the data we do have, we can test lots of hypotheses quickly and tweak experiments in ways that would be impractical with human subjects.”
They discovered that women tend to store more fat after a meal than men, but burn through that fat faster afterwards.
“Since women have more body fat on average than men, you would think that they would burn less fat for energy, but they don’t,” said Layton.
“The results of the model suggest that women store more fat immediately after a meal but also burn more fat during a fast.”
Therefore, women hoping to lose weight are better off eating a fattier breakfast than men, as they burn through the fat in between meals.
“We hypothesize that this increased reliance on fat metabolism in females is influenced by sex differences in liver and adipose tissue,” the researchers wrote in the paper.
“We propose that sex differences in fasting hepatic glucose output may result from the different handling of free fatty acids, glycerol, and glycogen.”
The researchers hope to further investigate the differences in metabolism between men and women, and look into how weight, age, and menstrual cycles come into play.
“Integrating sex-specific data and parameters into multi-scale frameworks holds the potential to enhance our understanding of human metabolism and its modulation by sex.
“By considering the intricate interplay among organs, hormones, and metabolic pathways, these models can offer valuable insights into the underlying mechanisms driving sex-specific metabolic responses”
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References
Abo, S. M. C., & Layton, A. T. (2024). Modeling sex-specific whole-body metabolic responses to feeding and fasting. Computers in Biology and Medicine, 181. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compbiomed.2024.109024
