Eat carbs at end of meal to curb diabetes: docs

Eat the meal, then the bread. That’s advice for people with diabetes from researchers who’ve found more evidence that saving carbs for the end of your meal may help control the metabolic disorder that affects 29 million Americans.

Carbohydrate-rich foods, like bread and juice, trigger a spike in blood sugar levels.

Led by endocrinologist Alpana Shukla and obesity specialist Louis Aronne, of Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, researchers found that people with type 2 diabetes who ate protein and vegetables before they consumed carb-heavy bread and orange juice had a significantly lower increase in blood sugar after the meal, compared to when they ate carbs first.

The decrease “is comparable to the kind of effect you see with some of the drugs we use to treat diabetes,” Shukla told Reuters Health. “Eating carbohydrates last may be a simple strategy for regulating post-meal glucose levels.”

The new study builds on earlier Weill research into how the timing of carbs in meals makes a difference. In the just-published study in BMJ Open Diabetes Research and Care, 16 men and women with type 2 diabetes ate the exact same meal but on three separate occasions, one week apart, eating the items in a different order each time.

In one sitting, subjects ate bread and orange juice first, then ate chicken and salad, and in a second trial, participants reversed the order. Subjects also ate the chicken, salad ingredients and bread as a sandwich, accompanied by the juice.

When people ate the carbs last, their post-meal blood glucose levels were about half as high as when they ate carbs first. They were also around 40% lower than when they ate all meal components together, the scientists found.

The carbohydrate-last meal was also linked to lower insulin secretion and higher levels of a gut hormone that helps regulate glucose and satiety.

“The new findings offer people a simple strategy for preventing glucose spikes when consuming carbs,” Shukla said.

The research team is testing the carbs-last strategy in people with prediabetes, where their blood sugar levels are higher than normal but not high enough to be classified as type 2 diabetes.