Often referred to as “the most important meal of the day”, a good breakfast provides us with many benefits. These include:
- improving our concentration
- Improving mental performance
- Improving mood and memory.1
In addition to this, a healthy breakfast is a great source of important vitamins and minerals essential for our body’s health and well-being.1 Another fab reason to eat a nutritious breakfast every day is that it helps you maintain a healthy weight!
Kick-starting your day with breakfast will make you feel full through the morning struggles meaning you’re less likely to snack on unhealthy, high energy, high fat foods to try to keep you going.1
But what’s the importance of breakfast for diabetes? In fact there are even more reasons to eat a nutritious breakfast when you have diabetes…
Breakfast for type 1 diabetes
For people with type 1 diabetes, the key is to match your insulin dose with the amount of carbohydrate that you eat.2 There are many types of insulin and they can act differently. For example, different types of insulin may start to work at different times and then run out at different times.2 Because of this, it is important to be aware of your insulin action so you can plan your carbohydrate intake.2 Breakfast is important to bring your blood sugar up to a steady level after a nights rest. Always monitor your blood sugar levels throughout the day and night to make sure that it is within your target levels, as guided by your doctor or diabetes educator.
Breakfast for type 2 diabetes
To help manage your diabetes, it is important that you eat regular healthy meals and snacks spread over the day.3 This will help control your blood sugar levels and keep them steady over the day. A new study has shown that skipping breakfast and “fasting” until noon can trigger huge blood sugar spikes and impairs the insulin responses throughout the rest of the day in people with type 2 diabetes.4 This means that skipping breakfast can actually lead to higher sugar levels throughout the day (regardless of the amount of carbohydrate and sugar in your lunch and dinner)! You can read more about the study here.
So you can see, there are many reasons to start the day off with a good breakfast!
…Watch this space for our next post on what makes a good breakfast!