If you exercise in the morning, it may be a good idea to eat breakfast first.
A
small British study finds that having breakfast before a morning
workout triggers the body to burn more carbohydrates during exercise and
also speeds digestion afterward.
The study
included 12 healthy men who did an hour of cycling in the morning. They
either had a breakfast of porridge made with milk two hours before
exercise, or had breakfast after they exercised.
The
researchers tested the blood glucose levels and muscle glycogen levels
of the volunteers. They found that eating breakfast increased the rate
at which the body burned carbohydrates during exercise, and increased
the rate the body digested and metabolized food eaten after exercise,
too.
"This
is the first study to examine the ways in which breakfast before
exercise influences our responses to meals after exercise," study
co-leader Javier Gonzalez, a senior lecturer at the University of Bath,
said in a school news release.
Study
co-leader Rob Edinburgh is a Ph.D. student at the university. "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," he said.
"This
increase in the use of muscle glycogen may explain why there was more
rapid clearance of blood sugar after 'lunch' when breakfast had been
consumed before exercise," Edinburgh said.
"This
study suggests that, at least after a single bout of exercise, eating
breakfast before exercise may 'prime' our body, ready for rapid storage
of nutrition when we eat meals after exercise," he added.
The study was published Aug. 15 in the American Journal of Physiology: Endocrinology and Metabolism.
"As
this study only assessed the short-term responses to breakfast and
exercise, the longer-term implications of this work are unclear, and we
have ongoing studies looking at whether eating breakfast before or after
exercise on a regular basis influences health," Edinburgh noted.