This Fiber Trick Dropped Blood Sugar 37 Points in Type 2 Diabetics

Eating Fiber Before Meals Dropped Fasting Blood Glucose by 37 Points

One of the things that we as people are most deficient in, especially in the United States, is fiber. Most adults get around 15 grams a day when the target sits closer to 25 to 30, and that gap shows up in blood sugar long before it shows up anywhere else.

Here is the study that made me pay attention. What they did is they had a bunch of people with type 2 diabetes. And for their control group, what they did is they actually had them consume soluble fiber before they ate their meals.

And what they found was that when they did that, it actually dropped their fasting blood glucose by 37 milligrams per deciliter. And it also lowered their HbA1c by almost a full point, going from roughly 8.2 percent down to about 7.3 over eight weeks of psyllium taken before meals (Abutair 2016).

The only thing they changed in their diet, their habits, everything else in between, was just adding fiber before they ate.

That number matters because HbA1c is an average of your blood sugar over about three months, so it does not move for a single good day or a single bad one. Shifting it a full point means the curve after every meal got flatter for weeks on end.

Well, what fiber does when it's consumed with food is it actually makes it so that your body takes longer and more effort to digest. Soluble fiber pulls in water and forms a gel, and that gel sits in your stomach and small intestine as a physical barrier between the starch you ate and the enzymes trying to break it down.

Think of it like the difference between pouring water onto bare soil and pouring it onto a sponge. Same water, same soil underneath, but the sponge decides how fast it gets there.

That stuff spends more time in your digestive tract, which means that you get a slower, more stable release of sugar into your blood as it's being digested. Jenkins, the researcher who developed the glycemic index, showed decades ago that the viscosity of the fiber is what predicts the blunting of the glucose response, not the total grams on the label (Jenkins 1985).

That viscosity point is the one most people miss, and it explains why a fiber supplement that dissolves clear and thin does almost nothing for blood sugar while psyllium, which thickens into a gel within a minute or two, does quite a lot.

There is also a pattern in the data worth knowing. The worse your glycemic control is to start with, the bigger the drop, and in people with normal blood sugar the effect is close to nothing (Gibb 2015).

So if your fasting glucose is already 85, this is not going to move you. If it is 140, it has room to work.

The simplest version: five grams of psyllium husk in a glass of water, ten to fifteen minutes before your two largest meals of the day. Drink it fast, because it thickens.

If you have never eaten much fiber, start at two or three grams and build up over two weeks, because jumping straight to ten will give you gas and cramping and you will quit before you see anything. Water matters too, since the whole mechanism depends on the fiber having enough fluid to form the gel in the first place.

What strikes me about this is that nobody was asked to eat less. The meals stayed the same, the carbs stayed the same, and the only variable was what happened in the ten minutes before the fork picked up the food. The sugar was never the problem on its own. The speed was.

Research: Abutair et al., Nutr J 2016. Jenkins & Jenkins, Proc Soc Exp Biol Med 1985. Gibb et al., Am J Clin Nutr 2015.

References:

Gibb RD, McRorie JW Jr, Russell DA et al.. Psyllium fiber improves glycemic control proportional to loss of glycemic control: a meta-analysis of data in euglycemic subjects, patients at risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus, and patients being treated for type 2 diabetes mellitus. Am J Clin Nutr. 2015. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26561625/

Abutair AS, Naser IA, Hamed AT. Soluble fibers from psyllium improve glycemic response and body weight among diabetes type 2 patients (randomized control trial). Nutr J. 2016. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27733151/

Jenkins DJ, Jenkins AL. Dietary fiber and the glycemic response. Proc Soc Exp Biol Med. 1985. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3001740/