Eating protein and high-fiber foods before carbs may help prevent blood sugar spikes — but it won’t make or break your health.
When seeking a high-performance lifestyle, you might constantly look for ways to optimize your everyday practices and adopt tweaks that could make the smallest of improvements to your health. Of late, nutrient sequencing — eating particular nutrients in a specific order to keep blood sugar stable and increase satiety, among other effects — has entered the chat. But is it legitimate?
A 2023 review of 11 reports, published in the Journal of the American Nutrition Association, found that there may be acute benefits to eating vegetables or protein-rich foods before carbohydrate-rich ones. Specifically, consuming carbs last was linked with lower levels of blood glucose and insulin (a naturally occurring hormone that allows glucose to move from your blood into your cells, where it’s used for energy), according to the findings.
Reminder: Carbohydrates are a macronutrient your body digests rapidly for quick energy. Without any “buffer” from other, more slowly digesting nutrients, it could “easily spike blood sugar” if you’re already hungry, says Michelle Routhenstein, M.S., R.D., C.D.C.E.S., C.D.N., a certified diabetes educator and preventive cardiology registered dietitian. “When you're metabolizing protein, or when you're metabolizing non-starchy, high-fiber foods, your body has to work harder to digest them, so it actually makes you fuller and has a satiety effect earlier, so to speak, in your meal,” says Routhenstein. “You're also stimulating [the hormone] GLP [glucagon-like peptide]-1 that's going to suppress appetite. So all of these foods, in combination, slow down digestion, which is going to make you feel fuller and more satiated.”
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Also at play: Oftentimes, you end up eating a more balanced meal if you save carbs for later. “If you have the notion of, ‘Oh, I gotta get my protein and my vegetables first,’ you'll eat less carbs, and now you're filling up with more blood sugar-friendly foods in the right balance to help with blood sugar control,” says Routhenstein. In other words, pre-gaming your bowl of pasta with some chicken and veggies will likely fill you up — physically and mentally — more quickly than your spaghetti alone.
The impact on blood sugar and insulin may be particularly significant for individuals who are insulin resistant, have prediabetes, or are genetically predisposed to diabetes, says Routhenstein; it’s been suggested as a potential tool to help prevent the progression from prediabetes to type II diabetes. “Starting off a meal with protein first, or high-fiber foods first, can actually stimulate more GLP-1, which helps with enhancing insulin secretion, making you feel fuller so you potentially are eating less, and suppressing the body’s ability to have these blood sugar spikes,” she explains.
In a 2019 study on 15 participants with prediabetes, researchers found that eating protein and vegetables 10 minutes before carbohydrates kept glucose levels stable, while eating carbohydrates first was linked with greater swings in blood glucose levels. Similarly, eating carbs last was shown to create smaller increases in blood glucose after eating compared to eating protein and vegetables first in individuals with type 2 diabetes, according to a small 2017 study.
Still, “nutrient sequencing” isn’t necessarily effective — or a healthy option — for everybody, says Routhenstein. More research is being published on the topic, but the studies are small and the results can’t necessarily be applied to the general population. If reminding yourself to eat your veggies first helps you meet your dietary needs, then keep at it.
But meals aren’t always perfectly separated into carbs, protein, and veggie sections on your plate; tacos, burgers, and plenty of other meals mix all those elements together. “From a psychological perspective, if you're now, like, picking a plate apart, you're overthinking about, ‘Oh, I gotta eat this first, and I can't eat that,” she notes, “I feel like there could be a little bit more disordered eating, like, ‘I need to have this first, then this, or else it’s not going to work.’”
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Above all, a balanced approach to nutrition is key, and equally as important is making your meals a mentally and physically fulfilling experience. “Food has many elements to it, and we need to make sure we're still enjoying it, because that [provides] a level of satisfaction that's important in glucose management and in prevention of all chronic disease,” says Routhenstein. “If you don't enjoy the food that's in front of you, it's not sustainable and it causes more anxiety around food versus pleasure.”