For many years, the popular diet less rice – that is, as much as possible to reduce the intake of carbohydrates. This weight loss theory that rice, noodles, bread and other staple foods high in sugar, eat more to increase weight, but also not conducive to blood sugar control.
The principle behind this weight loss technique is that eating carbohydrates and high sugar content of food, especially those that do not contain fiber, the body absorbed quickly, the body’s blood sugar levels will quickly increase.
If not through exercise quickly consume these blood sugar, the pancreas must discharge a large amount of the hormone insulin, so that blood sugar levels back to normal.
In this process, the pancreas must store excess sugar from carbohydrates as fat. Too much fat storage, especially too much visceral fat, can lead to serious health problems like type 2 diabetes.
That is, people worry about eating too much while also worrying about the right time to eat.
For example, it is generally believed that eating more staples for breakfast is better for your health than eating more for dinner.
This is because when you wake up in the morning, your body is ready to go and you should consume the glucose released from your staple food very quickly. But if you eat at night, your body is ready to sleep, so it will take longer to consume the sugar.
Is this theory really true?
Breakfast or dinner?
Dr. Adam Collins of the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom conducted a small study.
Volunteers were recruited to participate in a trial to see how the body would react to eating more staples at breakfast or more staples at dinner.
In the experiment, all volunteers ate a daily ration of food: vegetables, bread, and pasta for five days in three sessions.
The first session: the volunteers ate the majority of their daily staple food for breakfast for five days, with very little left for dinner.
The second session: 5 days of eating the staple food according to their normal habits.
The third session was to eat most of the staple foods for dinner and less for breakfast for 5 days.
During these three sessions, Dr. Collins recorded their blood glucose levels. What did he find?
Dr. Collins said, “One theory that has always made sense to me is that it should be better for the body to have a full day to digest staple foods. So I expected that by eating a lot of carbohydrates at breakfast, the body would respond more easily.”
“But we don’t know exactly what happens when you eat more rice and noodles for dinner more often. There has never been a study like this before, and I’m looking forward to knowing the results as a scientific researcher.”
What is the result?
The best time
It was found that there is indeed an optimal time to eat staple foods, but it is not the breakfast that people think.
The researchers examined the average blood glucose of the volunteers in the first session, that is, those who ate a lot of staple foods for breakfast and less for dinner: their average blood glucose was 15.9.
This corresponded to the prediction.
However, the results for the third session, that is, volunteers who ate less staple food for breakfast and more staple food for dinner, were much more surprising.
Their average blood sugar was only 10.4, much lower than expected.
What is going on here?
One possibility is that it is not so important to eat more staple foods for breakfast or dinner; what is important is whether the interval between meals without staple foods, i.e., the “fasting” period without rice and noodles, is long enough.
If there is a long interval between meals that favor staple foods, the body will adapt well.
This is natural in the morning, when you have slept all night and are in the “fasting” period when you are not eating staple foods.
However, our little experiment also showed that if you eat fewer staple foods throughout the day, you can achieve about the same results.
In other words, after a few days of eating less food for breakfast and more food for dinner, the body can train itself to adjust to eating more staple foods in the evening.
Therefore, the doctor’s advice is: do not worry about what time of day you take in carbohydrates, do not worry about whether to eat more breakfast or more dinner, as long as you keep your own eating routine every day, do not eat a lot of staple foods at every meal.
What’s more important is the difference in peak blood sugar levels, if you eat a lot of rice and noodles at dinner, then the next day’s breakfast should be as little as possible to eat these foods with high sugar content.
If you have eaten a lot of toast in the morning, then don’t eat more noodles or rice for dinner.
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