Across sixteen days on a continuous glucose monitor, my breakfasts raised my blood sugar three times as much as my dinners.
The averages, from 36 logged meals:
Breakfast — up 33
Lunch — up 11
Dinner — up 11
I am not eating a worse breakfast than I eat a dinner. Eggs and vegetables are not more sugary at seven in the morning. Something else is going on, and the sensor showed me what.
Between three and eight in the morning, asleep and eating nothing at all, my blood sugar rose by 8 points. Nine o'clock was the highest hour of my day, every day, averaging 126. By ten at night I was down to 99.
This is the dawn phenomenon, and it is normal. Toward morning your body releases hormones to get you up and moving, and those hormones tell the liver to put glucose into the blood. You wake into a rise that started hours earlier.
So breakfast does not land on a flat line. It lands on a curve that is already climbing, and the same food produces a bigger number than it would at dinner.
Three things I would do with that:
Don't judge a food by breakfast alone. Test it again at dinner before you decide it is a problem. If it only spikes you in the morning, the issue is the timing, not the food.
Treat breakfast as your hardest meal, not your easiest. Most of us do the opposite — a rushed bowl of something, then a careful dinner.
Moving a food is easier than removing it. If the carbohydrate you don't want to give up costs you less at seven in the evening than at seven in the morning, that is a change you can actually keep.
— Alistair
PureNovus
Educational, not medical advice.