BIRMINGHAM, Alabama --The University of Alabama at Birmingham is
recruiting 30 adults, ages 55-75, for a study to see whether a
high-carbohydrate breakfast such as doughnuts or white bread
might turn off the body's ability to burn fat throughout the
day, as it has been shown to do in animals. Barbara Gower, a UAB
professor in the Department of Nutrition Sciences in the School
of Health Professions, has received a $160,000 grant from the
Egg Nutrition Center to study how food eaten for breakfast can
affect a person's metabolic health, UAB announced Tuesday.
"Morning appears to be the time of day when your body is geared
up to burn fat," Gower said in a statement. According to
previous research conducted by Molly Bray, a professor in the
Department of Epidemiology in the UAB School of Public Health, a
high-carbohydrate meal given to mice as the day's first meal
impaired the animals' ability to burn fat later in the day. The
mice that ate those meals also were fatter at the end of the
study and their blood-lipid