Regular Meals Reduce Obesity Risk in Adolescents

A recent study shows that eating 5 meals a day can help reduce obesity risk among adolescents.

Regular eating patterns can help protect adolescents from obesity according to this Finnish-population-based study that looked at more than 4,000 participants. Each consumed five meals-breakfast, lunch, dinner and two snacks a day, even those with a genetic predisposition to obesity who had no higher body mass index than their controls.

The collection of the data on the study population began prenatally and the participants were followed up with until the age of 16. The study authors note that their goal was to identify early-life risk factors that could be associated with obesity in order to investigate the association between meal frequencies, obesity and metabolic syndrome in order to examine whether meal frequency could potentially modulate the effect of common genetic variants linked to obesity. They then comprised the genetic data eight single nucleotide polymorphisms at or near eight obesity-susceptibility loci.

The results show that a regular five-meal pattern was often associated a reduced rusk of overweight and obesity in both sexes with a reduced risk of abdominal obesity in boys. Yet this meal pattern attenuated the BMI-increasing effect of the common genetic variants. Skipping breakfast was often associated with a greater BMI and waist circumference.

More information regarding this study can be found via the International Journal of Obesity.