Can a Low GI Breakfast Maximise Fat Burning?

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How important is the breakfast that you eat? Depending on what you’re doing to some people, it may not seem very important at all.

If you’re not familiar with the term GI this is an abbreviation for glycemic index, which is the measure of food and how quickly or slowly it turns into glucose in your body.

Now ideally you want the release of glucose to be slow because otherwise if it isn’t, and the rate of glucose is taken up quickly in your bloodstream. Then it won’t be too long before your blood sugar comes crashing down and you will be eating again, when you have high insulin dumps within your body all the time, it tells your liver to store the sugar as fat.

The reason for this is your liver will only tend to hold as much glucose as is needed. Hence the rest gets stored as fat. So what effect does having a low GI breakfast have on your workout?  well let’s see. It’s well known that eating a balanced diet combined with regular physical activity is a good combination when it comes to losing weight.

So does it in fact matter what you eat for breakfast? And will it affect the processes within your body? When you’re working out.

Research carried out at the University of Nottingham has found that, the type of breakfast you eat can be quite important as far as burning fat is concerned.

The study, led by Dr Emma Stevenson at the Universities Biomedical School , and published in the Journal of Nutrition.

Looked at eight women who were fit and led quite a sedentary lifestyle, during the first part of the process they went on a fast the night before. And on another part of the study they were deliberately given a breakfast that causes a high glucose spike. They also had a low GI breakfast during another part of it.

Both of the breakfasts used had similar calories. The high GI breakfast was cornflakes and milk, white bread and jam and a fizzy drink. The low GI one was milk and muesli, some tinned peaches, yoghurt, and apple juice. Both breakfasts contained the same amount of protein, fat, carbohydrates, and calories.

After three hours the participants walked for an hour approximately, on a treadmill this was graded at 50 percent of their normal exercise ability. During both periods of study they were given lunch. Some blood samples were taken before the participants ate breakfast, and every three hours thereafter. And for the post exercise period.

In addition, samples of air were taken when the participants were exercising and not. This information gave the researchers how much oxygen was being used, and the amount of carbon dioxide they produced. From this information, they could see how the carbohydrates and fat were being oxidised in the participant’s bodies.

They also took into account how the people’s appetites were affected this was measured using some special scales. As the researchers suspected there were high levels of glucose in the people who ate the high GI breakfast. But there glucose levels returned to normal, just before they started to exercise.

However, there was a difference in the low GI breakfast people, something called plasma fatty acids was noticeably higher in the low GI group which determines the amount of fat being used as a source of energy.

When both groups exercised their amount of FFA ’s (plasma fatty acids) started to rise but notably, the low GI group had higher levels of fat oxidisation compared to their counterparts.

In conclusion Dr Stevenson said that having a low GI breakfast does help with fat oxidisation both during at rest and exercise. She does go on to say that longer term studies do need to be conducted, to actually prove that this theory does work long-term.

But the participants whom had the low GI breakfast felt fuller for longer, and more than likely ate less throughout the day.The thing do to with this is try eating low GI foods before you exercise, and see what actual impact it has on your workout be your own guinea pig it can’t hurt to try.

Source and references

http://communications.nottingham.ac.uk/

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