Studies have shown that a good breakfast could hold the key to healthiness
still life of cereals with strawberries in bowl
The general consensus is that breakfast is good for you. Photograph: Junos/ Junos/beyond/Corbis

Up to two-thirds of us skip the first meal of the day but nutritionists say we should breakfast like kings and eat less later. There is some research that links eating a good breakfast with a reduction in the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. While it's tempting to miss breakfast when you're on a diet, it's not clear that this helps you to lose weight.

Last week a research team from Imperial College London presented its findings at the Neuroscience 2012 conference. The researchers scanned the brains of 21 healthy people as they showed them a variety of foods including chocolate, pizza and salad. They compared how attractive the foods were to people, as well as how much they ate for lunch after the scan on two days, one on which breakfast was missed and one on which they ate a large breakfast (750 calories). The researchers found that missing breakfast increased the appeal of high-calorie foods (as measured by increased orbital frontal cortex activity on the brain scan) and that people ate about 250 calories more at lunch. The researchers said this shows breakfast takes the edge off our appetite so we don't crave high-calorie foods. So, how should we be starting our days?

The solution

Studies have come up with a variety of suitable breakfast foods. There is some evidence in favour of the full English version (on the basis that eating fats primes the metabolism to be more efficient for the rest of the day). However, that study was done on mice and is not convincing – although the mice who ate a good breakfast were less likely to get chubby.

Chocolate cake is recommended by researchers from Tel Aviv University who found that a 600-calorie breakfast with proteins and carbohydrates, including a sweet treat, controlled cravings for sweet things for the rest of the day and kickstarted the body's metabolism. Their study looked at 193 obese people over 32 weeks and found those who ate sweet things at breakfast lost an average of 40lb more than those who didn't.

A study in the US journal Pediatrics of more than 2,000 teenagers found that a quarter missed breakfast but that those who ate it were on average five pounds lighter (and ironically less likely to have been dieting) than those who didn't.

However, it is always hard to prove cause and effect in dieting studies. People who eat breakfast often turn out to take more exercise and drink less alcohol so there may be other reasons for their weight loss.

A review of the research that added up results of nine studies on the relationship between eating breakfast cereals and weight, found that children and adults who regularly ate breakfast cereals (the study was funded by Kellogg's) were less likely to be overweight than those who did not eat them. The authors say this doesn't provide proof that cereals help you stay slim and that there was no evidence that their cereal eaters ate less throughout the day.

So, although eating breakfast is linked with being slimmer, this may simply be an association. There is, however, another more robust body of evidence that suggests children benefit from eating breakfast because it helps them to concentrate.