Overweight women, who skip breakfast, experience acute, or rapid-onset, insulin resistance, a condition that, when chronic, is a risk factor for diabetes, a new study has revealed.
The study funded by the Endocrine Fellows Foundation in Washington, D.C., the National Institutes of Health and the Colorado Nutrition Obesity Research Center, suggested that regularly skipping breakfast over time may lead to chronic insulin resistance and thus could increase an individual”s risk for type 2 diabetes.
Elizabeth Thomas, MD, an endocrinology fellow at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora, and co-workers studied nine nondiabetic women, with an average age of 29, who were overweight or obese.
Subjects were randomly assigned to receive either breakfast or no breakfast at the first visit and the opposite at the second visit.
Four hours later, all subjects ate the same standardized lunch at each visit. They had blood samples taken every 30 minutes after lunch for three hours to test their insulin and glucose levels.
The researchers found that the women”s insulin and glucose levels after lunch were significantly higher on the day they skipped breakfast than on the day when participants ate breakfast.
According to Thomas, the higher levels demonstrated acute insulin resistance because of skipping breakfast.
The research was presented Sunday at the Endocrine Society’s 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
