Is your healthy diabetic breakfast helping or hurting your blood sugar? Are you eating one of the three worst breakfasts for diabetes?
There are lots of foods that are supposed to be good for you.
Yes, generally speaking some of them may be for some people. But when you have high blood sugar you have to think differently.
They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day…. no, not really. But I’m going to give you three of the worst possible breakfast foods for diabetes. I’ll also give you some much better alternatives you can use as a healthy breakfast for diabetes.
Unhealthy breakfast foods for diabetics
Wheat bread – a sugary breakfast for diabetes type 1 & type 2
Lots of diabetics know that white bread will raise your blood sugar and they avoid it. But somehow people have been given the idea that wheat bread is good for you.
Maybe because it’s brown and looks natural and earthy?
There are several things to point out here:
- Sometimes the manufacturers add food colouring to this bread to make it look more “wheaty”.
- Another problem is that sometimes producers add sweeteners to the bread to make it more palatable because it really doesn’t taste very nice.
If you set aside these two issues, there’s another problem.
Wheat bread is made from finely ground wheat i.e. flour. Once you eat it in this form it will cause your blood sugar to go up. You will find that there is virtually no difference between your blood sugar when you eat wheat bread and when you eat white bread.
This is definitely one of the worst breakfasts for diabetes!
Instant oatmeal – this should not be part of your diabetes breakfast diet
This is one of the most popular breakfasts for diabetes. Yet anothe food that’s supposed to be super healthy for diabetics. It’s a true breakfast favourite.
But let me start by saying that if you’re eating instant oatmeal, the quick cooking 1, 2, 3, minutes variety, then you might as well eat white bread.
Once again, the same principle applies as for wheat bread. They chop up the oats into very small pieces, partially cooked, dried and packaged.
Once you eat them they are digested very fast, broken down into sugar and you absorb them very fast into your bloodstream. The blood sugar shoots up.
To make matters worse, you might decide to wash this down with skimmed / fat-free milk. Thereby adding even more sugar to your meal.
You might then decide to add insult to injury by throwing in some spoons of honey into that oatmeal. This is a disaster of a breakfast. There is no scenario in which this helps your blood sugar.
This is a very good example of a high glycemic index breakfast.
Breakfast cereal – not a healthy breakfast for diabetes
The third type of food that you should avoid if you have breakfast high blood sugar is breakfast cereals. This includes the various pops, krispies, flakes and things of that variety.
They are just little balls and flakes of sugar. They are so highly processed that they bear no resemblance whatsoever to the plants that they came from.
The box might look appealing and colourful; various prestigious organisations may endorse the cereal. It may be fortified with vitamins and minerals.
But then one might argue that if they didn’t remove the natural vitamins and minerals from the food in the act of processing it, they wouldn’t need to add the artificial ones back in.
These are bad for your health and terrible for your blood sugar!
Now before you cry foul just hear me out, just hang on. Don’t take my word for it.
Use your blood sugar glucose metre and check for yourself. Record your blood sugar 30 minutes 1 hour and 2 hours after eating any of these processed foods that I just talked about.
Write down your numbers and keep them as a reference. Then compare them with the numbers that you get after eating the alternative foods that I’m going to mention.
Now onto some more blood sugar friendly foods that you can eat for breakfast.
Breakfast foods for diabetes that won’t raise your blood sugar!
What makes a good diabetic breakfast?
A good diabetic breakfast:
- should not make your blood sugar shoot up,
- should keep you satisfied for several hours so you don’t feel like nibbling all day,
- it should be easy to put together, which means you’ll be more likely to prepare and eat it,
- it should be a good source of minerals and vitamins and other essential nutrients.
Healthy breakfasts for diabetes are all around and include many of the types of food you’re already eating.
What can I eat for breakfast with diabetes?
Eggs – a complete healthy breakfast for diabetes
Over the years eggs have become controversial for some reason. And it’s difficult to actually figure out why, because we’ve been eating eggs for many generations.
How did they suddenly become bad for us? Maybe it’s the rubbish that we’re eating with the egg, the processed junk that we eat for breakfast that’s actually causing the problem and not the eggs themselves.
Eggs are a super food.
They contain many important vitamins and minerals as well as antioxidants, high quality protein and healthy fats.
Fish – a low sugar breakfast for diabetes
People have very rigid ideas about what they should eat at certain times of the day. But there is no reason to restrict your foods in that way…. to decide that you can only certain things for breakfast, lunch or dinner.
So I’m going to suggest that you try fish for breakfast. You can try frozen fish, fresh fish, dry fish, sardines (minus the oil in the can). You can eat all these types of fish in the morning. If you choose a naturally oily fish, then you’ll get the benefits of the Omega-3 fatty acids that are in these fish.
These help with brain function and depression. They help with thinking, they are beneficial in heart disease, for improving insulin resistance and so much more.
Plain unsweetened yoghurt
This is a great, healthy breakfast for diabetics. Yoghurt is made from milk. Milk contains lactose which is milk sugar. The process that converts milk into yoghurt uses of the lactose.
So you will find that if you drink yoghurt, it will not raise your blood sugar as much as the same quantity of milk would.
You can combine the yoghurt with nuts like peanuts, almonds or walnuts. This will help you to stay satisfied through the day.
Greek yoghurt is an even better breakfast for diabetes.
I know that it’s hard to ignore all the advertising and the marketing around some of these food because they do use psychology to get you to buy them.
But that is exactly what you have to do. If you want to bring down your blood sugar, forget the hype.
When it comes to your blood sugar let your metre be your guide. It’s not biased in any way. It doesn’t like you, it doesn’t hate you, is not trying to sell you anything. It is completely objective.
If you let your glucose metre guide you when making your food decisions, it’s hard to go wrong.