Science may have changed its mind about breakfast, with new research indicating that the most important meal of the day isn't quite so vital as previously thought.

Recent studies show that "breakfast may be just another meal," said Emily Dhurandhar, assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, as quoted in a New York Times report.

A new research study that tapped 300 participants trying to lose weight involved randomly assigning people instructions to skip breakfast, eat breakfast daily or to continue with whatever they were doing. After four months, the subjects returned to be weighed in the lab, and whether or not they ate breakfast appeared to have no effect on weight results.

In a second study, 33 participants were randomly assigned directions to eat breakfast or to skip it. Conducted by University of Bath researchers, the study involved subjects that were not looking to lose weight. After six weeks, the research team found that volunteers' body weights, resting metabolic rates, cholesterol and most measures of blood sugar were unaffected by whether or not they consumed breakfast each day.

A key difference, however, was that people who ate breakfast seemed to have more energy in the morning and burned nearly 500 more calories than those who skipped the first meal of the day.

More research will be required to understand the effects of eating breakfast or not, said professor James Betts, who led the University of Bath study. He won't change his own eating habits after the research.

"I almost never have breakfast," Betts told the Times. "That was part of my motivation for conducting this research, as everybody was always telling me off and saying I should know better."

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