You sit down at a restaurant hungry.
Before the steak arrives, before the fish, before the chicken, before the salad, somebody puts a basket of warm bread six inches from your face.
Well, heck.
Of course you eat it.
Turns out that may be almost exactly backward from what it should be.
Researchers took 11 people with type 2 diabetes and gave them the same meal on two different days: chicken, salad, broccoli, bread and orange juice.
Same food. Same calories.
The first time they ate the bread and drank the orange juice first. Then they waited 15 minutes before eating the chicken and vegetables.
A week later they reversed it. Chicken and vegetables first, then the carbs.
What happened surprised me.
When the carbohydrates came last, the rise in blood glucose was substantially smaller. Insulin levels were lower too.
Nothing had been removed from the meal.
They just changed the order.
Now, eleven people is eleven people. I’m not rearranging my entire life around one tiny study.
But researchers kept looking.
A later study in people with type 2 diabetes found much the same thing. Another small study in people with prediabetes did too. Eating the protein and vegetables… or even vegetables alone… before the carbohydrate portion changed the glucose response afterward.
Which sent me down another rabbit hole.
We spend a large amount of time talking about what we eat.
Carbs. Fat. Protein. Fiber. Calories. Sugar.
Apparently when one food follows another may matter too.
That doesn’t make bread bad. It doesn’t mean everybody needs to sit at the dinner table with a stopwatch and wait ten minutes before being allowed to approach the potato.
Please don’t do that.
It does make me look differently at that restaurant bread basket.
They don’t bring it after you’ve eaten your salad and half your dinner.
They bring it when you’re hungry.
Sometimes before you’ve even figured out what you’re ordering.
And this may be the part I like most: trying this doesn’t require buying anything, measuring anything or downloading another damn app.
Next time you eat a meal with vegetables, protein and something starchy, eat the vegetables and protein first.
Leave the bread, rice, potato or whatever else until later.
See what happens.
Maybe nothing.
Maybe you notice you’re less interested in the bread by then.
Maybe your glucose monitor tells you something interesting if you use one.
Or maybe you simply discover that the bread basket has been running the whole operation for years.