Unpacking Nutrient Sequencing
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.”
RELATED: The Promise and Hype of Peptides