What is the best breakfast for blood sugar?
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Start with protein, like eggs or Greek yogurt, and pick slow carbs to go with it: rolled oats over instant oats (GI 55 against 79), muesli over cornflakes (57 against 81). Eat fruit whole instead of drinking it as juice. That breakfast makes a smaller hill than a bowl of flakes and a glass of orange juice.
What we’d do
Eggs or Greek yogurt first, then rolled oats or a slice of grainy bread, with whole fruit like berries or an apple. Skip the juice and the boxed flakes. If you love cereal, have it after the eggs rather than in place of them, and keep the bowl small.
Why breakfast gets so much blame
The classic American breakfast of cereal, toast and orange juice is mostly fast carbs, and people who switch to whole wheat toast often think they’ve fixed it. On the glycemic index, white bread scores 75 and whole wheat bread 74, so the color of the bread barely changes the hill.
How fast each food raises blood sugar
The glycemic index (GI) compares how fast a food’s carbs raise blood sugar against pure glucose, which scores 100. Low is 55 or less and high is 70 or more. These are from the international tables, 2008.
| Breakfast food | GI |
|---|---|
| Cornflakes | 81 |
| Instant oat porridge | 79 |
| White bread | 75 |
| Whole wheat bread | 74 |
| Muesli | 57 |
| Rolled oat porridge | 55 |
| Banana | 51 |
| Orange juice | 50 |
| Orange | 43 |
| Milk, full fat | 39 |
| Apple | 36 |
Instant oats and rolled oats are the same grain. Instant is cut finer, so your gut breaks it down faster. It’s like a log and kindling on a fire. Same wood, but the kindling goes up all at once.
Why the protein goes first
The order of a meal changes its hill. In 15 people with prediabetes, eating the chicken and vegetables first and the bread 10 minutes later cut the peak by more than 40%, compared with eating the bread first. The researchers think the fiber and fat eaten first slow down how fast the carbs get absorbed. That trial used a lunch of bread, chicken and salad, not breakfast, but eggs or yogurt before the oats follows the same idea.
Fruit or juice?
Orange juice and an orange score close on the GI table, 50 and 43. Over years, they go in opposite directions. In 187,382 health professionals followed for up to 24 years, every 3 servings a week of blueberries went with 26% less type 2 diabetes, apples and pears 7% less, and fruit juice 8% more. Eat the fruit and skip the juice.
People differ
GI is an average. In a study of 800 people and 46,898 meals, identical meals gave very different blood sugar responses from person to person. The international tables say the GI “should not be used in isolation”, since calories and what else is in the food count too. Ice cream scores 51, lower than rolled oats, and it still isn’t a good breakfast.
Test your instincts in which spikes more?, or see a plate’s hill change in Flatten the hill.
4 sources
- Atkinson FS, Foster-Powell K and Brand-Miller JC, International tables of glycemic index and glycemic load values: 2008, Diabetes Care, 2008pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Shukla AP and others, The impact of food order on postprandial glycaemic excursions in prediabetes, Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, 2019pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Muraki I and others, Fruit consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes: results from three prospective longitudinal cohort studies, BMJ, 2013pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Zeevi D and others, Personalized nutrition by prediction of glycemic responses, Cell, 2015pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
