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Big Breakfast Alters Appetite, Gut Health

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11–20 of 50 posts

Re: Big Breakfast Alters Appetite, Gut Health

#11
post #3
post #2

Interesting but they had no control.

The whole study design seems odd. Why not add a third high-fiber + high-protein group for example?

They would have needed 20 participants, which is too many.

Soon we will have more participants in the HN comments for the study, than were studied in the study.

Re: Big Breakfast Alters Appetite, Gut Health

#12
post #2

Interesting but they had no control.

I feel like the regular weight loss group was? Since it isn't necessarily rocket science for having mostly men stay in an easily determinable caloric deficit to lose weight. (Women have usually would be harder due to more conditions and hormone interactions that make finding a TDEE not as simple.)

Re: Big Breakfast Alters Appetite, Gut Health

#13

The abstract begins, "Growing evidence supports early eating to control appetite and energy balance". What does that mean? My unskilled reading of it is that there is recent evidence that eating breakfast helps with weight loss. But I'm confused because there was a 2019 meta-analysis that found that eating breakfast does NOT help with weight loss. https://www.bmj.com/content/364/bmj.l42

The problem there might be what people are eating for breakfast.

Re: Big Breakfast Alters Appetite, Gut Health

#16
post #2

Interesting but they had no control.

They used a crossover design, so each subject served as their own control. Not a bad choice for trials like this as you gain a lot of statistical power with fewer participants than a parallel-arm, non-crossover design.

Re: Big Breakfast Alters Appetite, Gut Health

#18
post #7

19 participants.

>> therefore 19 participants completed the study (2 females and 17 males) and their data are presented throughout Who in their own mind decided that this is a "study" worth publishing?

You're reading the study wrong.

You read

  We saw this effect, so it's real. 
In actuality it is

  We saw this effect in a small study, so it's worth doing a larger study.
It's worth publishing because it's evidence and motivation to do further studying. And if you're asking "Why not start large?" the answer is obvious: money.

Re: Big Breakfast Alters Appetite, Gut Health

#20
post #7

19 participants.

>> therefore 19 participants completed the study (2 females and 17 males) and their data are presented throughout Who in their own mind decided that this is a "study" worth publishing?

The paper includes a section on power analysis which justifies the sample size (although the justification is for a sample of 20, they recruited 25 eligible participants and lost 6 in screening).

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.

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