Brain scans show that skipping breakfast makes fatty, high calorie foods appear far more attractive later in the day, according to researchers.

Scans of 21 people showed the brain was more attracted to food if breakfast was missed and people had more food at lunch. Scientists said it made loosing (sic) weight challenging as missing meals made calorific food even more appealing.

Twenty one people, who were all normal weight, were shown pictures of calorie packed foods while they were positioned in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine at Imperial College London.

On one day they were given no breakfast before the scans and on a different day they were fed a large, 730 calorie, breakfast an hour and a half before.

The researchers said skipping breakfast created a “bias” in the brain in favour of high calorie foods.

The results, presented at the Neuroscience 2012 conference, showed the brain changed how it responded to pictures of high calorie foods, but not low calorie foods, when breakfast was skipped. They showed part of the brain thought to be involved in “food appeal”, the orbitofrontal cortex, became more active on an empty stomach.