Impact of Different Breakfast Meals on Food Choices, Eating Behaviors and Brain Activation
Condition: Regulation, Appetite; Eating Behavior; Cognition
Study type: Interventional

Summary: 
      This project aims to demonstrate that the best breakfast meal is the one able to improve the
      best postprandial hunger, satiety and adiposity regulators profile as well as the best
      reward-related gratification, due to hedonistic parameters. To do this, 4 different
      breakfasts will be tested and blood tests, food choices, and attentional components will be
      analysed.
    

Detailed description: 
      Although breakfast seems to be positively associated with healthy eating patterns and food
      choices later in the day, eating behaviours are a complex interaction of several factors.
      Nutritional requirements are not only affected by the body homeostasis, but also by
      environmental signals, as cultural and social habits, lifestyle, etc. These parameters evoke
      reward-related and motivational signals influencing our daily eating behaviour choices. Most
      of the theories on food regulation propose two parallel systems interacting with food
      consumption homeostatic and reward-related systems. For all these reasons, there is an
      increasing interest on motivational and decisional aspects of food choices, eating behaviours
      and how they are influenced by food characteristics. This project aims to explore the
      association between compositional and perceived characteristics of a breakfast meal with
      nutritional/biochemical/physiological variables. The approach will be the evaluation of
      appetite, food intake as well as metabolic and compensatory responses to foods consumed
      during the day. Volunteers (n=15) will be fed with 4 different breakfast meals (one control
      and three iso-caloric with different glycemic indexes) and several different parameters will
      be evaluated, as biological parameters linked to satiety, food choices during a free lunch
      buffet, psycho-physiological and biological mechanisms underlying the compensatory effect and
      attentional components in the postprandial period. The participants will complete, in
      randomized order, the four breakfast meals, on four different weeks, separated by at least
      one week.
    

Intervention name(s): Breakfast consumption; Blood tests; Food choices and energy intakes assessments; Attention tests; fRMI tests
Intervention type(s): Other; Other; Other; Other; Other
Intervention description(s): Participants will consume the assigned breakfast each morning for 7 days. Participants will express a hedonic rating of the breakfast through 7-point Likert Scales before (overview) and after breakfast consumption.; On the third day, participants will be involved in blood tests. Blood will be taken at baseline (fasting), and up to 4 hours after consuming the breakfast. Participants will complete serial visual analog rating scales of hunger and fullness before (fasting) and every 30 minutes up to 4 hours after breakfast consumption.; Following the last blood sample, participants will be given the opportunity to consume food ad libitum from a buffet lunch. Double weighing of food will be set up to evaluate food choices and energy intake of lunch. During the test week, participants will record all foods and beverage on a 7-day food dairy.; On the fourth day, 4 hours after the breakfast consumption and avoid other foods, participants will be involved in attentional test (Mackworth Clock Test for sustained attention and Stroop Test for selective attention).; On the fifth day, 4 hours after the breakfast consumption and avoid other foods, participants will focus on a set of photographs (stimuli will be randomly choose from three categories of pictures including food, nonfood, and blurred baseline images) during an fMRI brain scan procedure to scan brain activation responses
Allocation: Randomized
Intervention model: Crossover Assignment
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary purpose: Basic Science
Keywords: Breakfast; Food choices; Lunch; Eating habits; Appetite; Neural activation; Attention; Glucose; Insulin; fMRI