Does eating salad before carbs lower blood sugar?

In a small study, it did. At Weill Cornell in 2015, 11 adults with type 2 diabetes ate the same meal twice, a week apart. When they ate the salad, broccoli and chicken first and the bread and juice 15 minutes later, their blood sugar an hour in was 37% lower than when the bread came first. It was one meal in 11 people, but it costs nothing to try.

Most blood sugar advice is about what to eat less of. This is about order. The food on the plate was the same, the calories were the same, and the only change was which part went in first. That sounds too simple to matter, but the drop was large.

It works a bit like a crowd going through a single door. The same people get through either way, but they come out spread over time instead of all at once.

What they ate, and what happened

The 11 adults (6 women, 5 men) were 54 on average, had had type 2 diabetes for about 5 years and took metformin. The 628 calorie meal was ciabatta bread and orange juice, a skinless grilled chicken breast, a lettuce and tomato salad with low-fat Italian vinaigrette, and steamed broccoli with butter. On the first visit they ate the bread and juice first and the rest 15 minutes later. A week later they did it the other way around.

Over the full two hours, the rise in blood sugar was about 73% smaller, and insulin at an hour was about half. The authors wrote that the size of the drop was comparable to what drugs aimed at after-meal blood sugar achieve.

What it doesn’t tell us

It was a pilot. There were only 11 people, all with type 2 diabetes, and they always did the bread-first meal on the first visit, so the order of the visits wasn’t shuffled. Blood sugar was followed for two hours after one meal. Nobody knows from this study whether eating this way for months lowers A1c, or how big the effect is in people without diabetes. The researchers said the reason it works still needs study.

We think the effect at a single meal is real for people with type 2 diabetes, since the drop was large and unlikely to be chance. Whether it adds up to better health over time is still open.

Try it on yourself

If you check your blood sugar at home, eat the same meal two ways on two days, salad and protein first one day and bread first the other, and check at the same time after each. For the salad itself, build it in the bowl builder, and for what a salad first does to how much you eat, see does eating a salad first help you eat less.