Drink coffee after breakfast, not before, for better metabolic control

<a href="https://www.freepik.com/photos/food">Food photo created by freepik - www.freepik.com</a>

A strong, black coffee to wake you up after a bad night’s sleep could impair control of blood sugar levels, according to a new study done at the University of Bath. Keeping our blood sugar levels within a safe range reduces the risk of conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease, hence these results could have ‘far-reaching’ health implications.

For their study, 29 healthy men and women underwent 3 different overnight experiments:

1.       Participants had a normal night’s sleep and consumed a sugary drink on waking-up.

·       Participants experienced a disrupted night’s sleep (where the researchers woke them every hour for five minutes) and then upon waking were given the same sugary drink.

·       Participants experienced the same sleep disruption this time were first given a strong black coffee 30 minutes before consuming the sugary drink.

Past research suggests that losing many hours of sleep over one and/or multiple nights can have negative metabolic effects, but these findings highlight that one night of disrupted sleep did not worsen participants’ blood glucose/insulin responses at breakfast.

However, strong black coffee consumed before breakfast substantially increased the blood glucose response to breakfast by around 50%. This new study therefore reveals that drinking coffee after a bad night’s sleep may solve the problem of feeling sleepy but could limit your body’s ability to tolerate the sugar in your breakfast.

Therefore, it may be better to consume coffee following breakfast rather than before.

There is a lot more we need to learn about how much sleep disruption is necessary to impair our metabolism, what longer-term implications of this are, and how exercise could help to counter some of these.

Here is the research:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-nutrition/article/glucose-control-upon-waking-is-unaffected-by-hourly-sleep-fragmentation-during-the-night-but-is-impaired-by-morning-caffeinated-coffee/398A3EDA8C30EC89ADBB4C74C8E244B0