Feast in the Morning and Diet at Night to Manage Diabetes

To keep a tab on diabetes, eat your breakfast like an athlete and nibble your dinner like a princess, says a recent study.

According to the researchers from Sweden and Israel who conducted a small-scale study type 2 diabetics should try and eat a high-energy breakfast as well as a low energy dinner to control their blood sugar levels.

The researchers worked with eight men and 10 women who had lived with type 2 diabetes for less than 10 years. The age of the participants ranged from 30 to 70 years and they had a body mass index that ranged between 22 and 35. Ten of the 18 participants who took part were treated with a diet advice and drug metformin combination and the rest of the participants were treated with only diet advice.

The patients were randomly selected so they could follow one of the two diets, referred to as the B diet or the D diet. Following the B diet over a week involved eating 2, 946kj breakfast, 2, 525kj lunch and 858kj dinner. Some offerings in the large meal included milk, tune, granola bars, yogurt, scrambled eggs and cereal. The small meal included sliced turkey breast, salad, mozzarella and coffee.

All the participants ate their breakfast at 8 in the morning, lunch at 1 in the afternoon and dinner at 7 in the evening.

Professor Oren Froy of Hebrew University of Jerusalem said, “A person's meal timing schedule may be a crucial factor in the improvement of glucose balance and prevention of complications in type-2 diabetes and lends further support to the role of the circadian system in metabolic regulation”.

On the sampling day or the seventh day, the blood samples of the participants were drawn before breakfast and at intervals of 15, 30, 60, 90, 120, 150 and 180 minutes after the participants had begun eating. After about two weeks, the diet plans of the patients were swapped and the researchers re-tested the blood.

It was found that after eating, the glucose levels of the participants was comfortable 20 percent lower while the insulin levels, C-peptide and glucagon-like peptide 1 hormone were 20 percent higher in participants who followed the B diet compared with those who followed the D diet.
The professor said that the observations suggested that a change in meal timing influences the daily rhythm of post-meal insulin as well as incretin and leads to a substantial reduction in the everyday post-meal glucose levels.

The study was published in the Journal Diabetologia.

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Article courtesy: thestar.com
Image courtesy: Getty