When is the best time to eat cookies and cakes to stabilize blood sugar?

I believe many people have this dilemma: they want to eat some cookies or desserts occasionally, but they are worried about gaining weight and raising their blood sugar.

In fact, for most healthy people, snacks and desserts are not a dietary taboo if you don’t eat them every day or eat a lot. The key is to control the amount and frequency .

The so-called quantity control means controlling the amount of desserts you eat within the range of 50 grams of added sugar per day. If you do not drink sweet drinks, nor eat candies, preserved fruits, jams and other foods, and only eat a small cake of about 50 grams, it will not exceed the reasonable range. If you do not want to gain weight, you only need to increase exercise or reduce the amount of staple food accordingly. If you eat it occasionally, you don't have to worry about it.

However, for those who need to control their blood sugar , they need to be more careful. Not only the quantity should be controlled, but also the time of eating dessert should be considered.

Traditionally, Western-style meals are served with dessert after dinner. Now many restaurants also serve desserts after lunch or dinner. However, these foods can also be served as part of morning tea or afternoon tea, as a snack between meals. Especially when breakfast or lunch is light, it is reasonable to eat some snacks between meals.

So, when is the best time to eat these sweet snacks? Two previous studies have provided relevant evidence.

One study compared the effects of consuming a sweet snack after lunch (12:30 p.m.), between lunch and dinner (15:30 p.m.), and after dinner (19:30 p.m.) on blood sugar excursions in healthy women [1].

The snack used is cake, which is the favorite of many girls. One piece has a calorie content of 498kcal, including about 28g of fat, 54g of carbohydrates and 8g of protein.

Cake is really a calorie bomb. It looks soft, moist, and has a lot of moisture, but in fact, the softness is not caused by moisture, but by fat...

The calorie values ​​of the three meals are 351 kcal for breakfast, 549 kcal for lunch, and 656 kcal for dinner. This situation is very close to daily life. Although it is ideal to evenly supply calories and nutrients for the three meals (for example, the nutritional recipes I make are basically evenly supplied for the three meals), in reality, most people tend to have a makeshift breakfast and the most abundant dinner.

The female volunteers wore continuous blood glucose meters, which the researchers used to monitor their blood sugar fluctuations from lunch to breakfast the next day. Their average blood sugar curves are shown in Figure 1.

Eating cake after lunch is represented by the green line. Eating cake after dinner is represented by the red line. Eating between meals is the blue line.

It is clear that eating cake after dinner has the worst effect, with a particularly high blood sugar peak after dinner and the lowest blood sugar troughs between lunch-dinner and dinner-breakfast.

Dinner is the largest portion of food, and with dessert, there are too many calories and a high total amount of carbohydrates, so it is understandable that the blood sugar peak is high. Breakfast is small and lunch is not enough, so the blood sugar level will reach a trough 4-6 hours after lunch.

What's worse is that the high blood sugar level after dinner affects the blood sugar response the next day . It is easy to have low blood sugar levels in the early morning and high blood sugar response after breakfast.

Eating cake after lunch is much better. Although the blood sugar level at lunch drops slowly and there is a trough after 5-6 hours, the fluctuation is not that large and does not affect the blood sugar level after dinner and breakfast the next day.

If you eat cake at 15:30 between lunch and dinner, it will cause little fluctuation in blood sugar, and prevent the blood sugar trough 4 to 6 hours after the meal. The blood sugar response at night and after breakfast the next day is also relatively stable.

Experiments conducted on patients with type 2 diabetes found the same pattern: snacking between lunch and dinner is more effective than snacking after lunch[2].

However, diabetics are more sensitive to food. Eating 17 grams of biscuits after lunch, which has only 75 kcal and contains only 13.5 grams of carbohydrates, can cause a significant increase in blood sugar fluctuations: the blood sugar peak after lunch rises higher and decreases too quickly, resulting in excessive blood sugar rises at dinner. If biscuits are eaten between meals, the blood sugar levels at lunch, dinner, and even in the early hours of the morning will become more stable, without such big ups and downs .

Some people may say: If I eat more this time, my blood sugar will rise more, and if I eat less next time, my blood sugar will rise less, isn’t it the same in the end? In fact, it is different.

This is because blood sugar levels are more important when they are stable. Excessive fluctuations in blood sugar levels are themselves a metabolic stressor. Excessive fluctuations in blood sugar levels during the day are closely related to the risk of diabetic retinopathy and neurological diseases, the risk of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, and all-cause mortality [3]. Therefore, blood sugar control measures should not only control fasting blood sugar levels and the average daily blood sugar level, but more importantly, keep daily blood sugar fluctuations as small as possible. In professional terms, this means working hard to reduce the variability of blood sugar levels (glycemic variability, GV).

Some studies have found that not having food for too long, and then eating when you are obviously hungry, can cause your blood sugar to rise excessively[4]. Other studies have found that for people who are used to eating at a certain time, delaying lunch or dinner can also cause an increase in postprandial blood sugar response[5].

In addition, studies on pre-meal loading have found that eating carbohydrate-containing foods 30 minutes before a meal can also effectively control the rise in blood sugar after a meal[6].

Therefore, people who need to control blood sugar, including those who need to lose weight, should pay attention to maintaining a stable food intake and a stable carbohydrate supply, and it is best to reasonably distribute energy and carbohydrates among the three meals a day. If you need to add a snack, you may wish to put it in the middle of the two meals, or add a small snack half an hour before the meal.

Postscript: So, among all kinds of snacks, which types are more ideal for preventing overeating and controlling blood sugar? We will talk about this later.