Dieticians always highlight the importance of eating breakfast every day, as it is thought to boost a person’s energy, help individuals maintain a healthy weight and even encourage weight loss.

But new research from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is challenging that theory, finding that regularly skipping breakfast did not influence weight loss or weight gain in a group of study participants, the Medical Daily reported with reference to Medical News Today.

The new study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, followed 309 otherwise-healthy overweight and obese adults over a 16-week time period. During that time, some experimental groups were told to skip breakfast and others were told to eat breakfast.

Overall, the researchers found no significant weight loss between the breakfast skippers and the breakfast eaters.

David Allison, director of the UAB Nutrition Obesity Center and senior investigator on the study and his team hope to do more research to understand why eating or skipping breakfast did not influence weight loss, which may help others to re-evaluate what is important for a healthy diet.