EATING most of your daily calories at breakfast could help you live to 100, experts suggest.
People who live in so-called “Blue Zones” — the areas of the world with the most centenarians — often stick to a principle of eating their biggest meal at the start of the day.
GettyEating most of your daily calories at breakfast could help you live to 100, experts suggest[/caption]
Blue Zone experts suggest you stick to the motto of: “Breakfast like a king; lunch like a prince; dinner like a pauper.”
The zones include Ikaria in Greece, Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, Loma Linda in California and Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica.
Diets vary across the regions, but all have a focus on balancing vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, seeds, healthy fats and whole grains, with minimal meat and saturated fats.
Nicoyans often eat two breakfasts and a light dinner, munching on bean dishes for breakfast that are high in protein and fibre.
These can include gallo pinto — the national dish of Costa Rica, which is made of black beans, rice, onion, peppers and coriander.
In Okinawa, breakfasts often include miso soup and rice and people may skip dinner all together.
Meanwhile, residents in Loma Linda — home to many followers of the evangelical Seventh-day Adventist Church — like to have one meal in mid-morning and another at 4pm.
These first can be anything from porridge to scrambled tofu, with Adventists choosing to avoid most animal products like eggs.
Previous research has shown consuming most of your calories at the start of the day can reduce your risk of obesity and heart disease.
One study, published in Obesity, looked at how eating more for breakfast compared to dinner affected weight loss in a group of 93 overweight and obese women.
Half ate 700 calories for breakfast, 500 at lunch and 200 at dinner, while the other half had 200 at breakfast, 500 at lunch and 700 at dinner.
After 12 weeks, the larger breakfast group lost 2.5 times as much weight as the larger dinner group.
Their blood flats fell by a third over the course of the study, while the larger dinner group’s increased by 14.6 per cent.
Dr Tel Aviv University, of Tel Aviv University in Israel, said: “High-calorie breakfast with reduced intake at dinner is beneficial and might be a useful alternative for the management of obesity and metabolic syndrome.”