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BLOOD SUGAR LEVELS

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Posted 3/30/2011 3:25 PM (GMT 0)
Does spacing your meals more reduce spikes in blood sugar levels for example if you have the same 4 meals in a day but eat them 3 hours apart as opposed to eating them 4 hours apart. I am diabetic and I want to know some info regarding this. Thanks.
Posted 3/30/2011 5:42 PM (GMT 0)
Hi Alex, welcome to the Forum.  It sort of depends on what your blood sugar levels are at when you start eating the meal.  Naturally if you start eating a meal and your blood sugar is already at 120, then you'll see higher blood sugar afterwards than if your blood sugar were at 100 when you started to eat.  There are other factors too:  meds or not, what you eat at the meals, what you do between the meals, etc.  Are you on meds?
Posted 4/9/2011 1:14 PM (GMT 0)
Thank you for answering!

I am not on meds actually, does that make

a difference in the answer somehow?

Posted 4/9/2011 3:06 PM (GMT 0)
Just trying to get a handle on the situation since several factors besides the timing of meals can affect the blood sugar.  Anyway, eating smaller meals spaced out at equal intervals throughout the day helps keep the blood sugar on a more even level, but doing that is hard to do if you're at work or school, etc.  Eating a large amount of food, even low carb food, at one sitting will cause a spike compared to a smaller meal. 
Posted 4/9/2011 8:34 PM (GMT 0)
If your question is about reducing spikes then the answer has more to do with WHAT you eat rather than how far you spaced those meals apart. It's the make-up (combination of carbs, fats, proteins) of that meal that causes a spike in blood sugar or not.

If you ate nothing but sugar/highly refined carbs... your blood sugar would spike and the 'meal' would be processed through the stomach very fast - meaning you'd also be hungry again very quickly. Add a portion of fat and/or protein and you've got what I call a spike mitigator and and meal extender. So long as the portions are appropriate, there wouldn't be much difference between a 3 or 4 hour postprandial BGL reading.

As Diabetics, we know what foods "spike" our blood sugars and those are the items we try to eliminate or portion-reduce in our meals, thus mitigating or controlling that rise.
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