Mini-meals or 3 meals a day? - A test

May 22, 2000

Lily,

In my previous posting on this subject, I proposed breaking my

breakfast down into 8 mini-meal parts and eating them one after the

other at 20 minute intervals to see if that would keep the blood

glucose from my food intake within the impaired storage capacity of

my liver throughout the meal.

Well, I tried that out today. With the first part it took over an

hour before my blood glucose concentration got back down to my

baseline BG again and the area under the curve was 793 mg%-minutes

according to the method described in 'The Glucose Revolution'. That

would mean that my complete breakfast eaten in 8 mini-meals would

have taken over 8 hours to completely metabolize in this way and I

could expect a total area under the curves of 8 x 793 = 6344 mg%-

minutes.

So I ate all the remaining 7 parts together in the next 15 minutes

and then followed the BG curve up and down as before. With them it

took just over 2 hours before my BG returned to baseline again but

the area under the curve was only 3905 mg%-minutes or 558 mg%-minutes

per part.

You can see how the curve looks and the ingredients of the meal at:

I deduce from this that eating my breakfast in 8 separate mini-meals

would have resulted in 793/558 = 1.42 or 42% more advanced

glycosylation end-products (HbA1c) than eating it all together as one

main meal. A possible explanation is that there is some

insulin 'overhead' with each meal, however small the meal is, and

that eating 8 mini-meals incurs 8 times that 'overhead' whereas one

main meal incurs it only once so that it is more mean-BG-efficient to

eat one main meal than eat many small ones.

I realize that all this is not very scientific but it makes me wonder

what information those people are relying on that recommend diabetics

eat small meals plus snacks between meals.

For my part, I feel justified in having only two main meals a day

(breakfast and dinner), a minimal lunch and no snacks whatever in

between.

I hope that provides a more substantial answer than my previous

attempt.

Regards

Thornton

Pforzheim, Germany

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