21st April 2021

People who experience big dips in blood sugar levels several hours after eating end up feeling hungrier and consuming hundreds more calories during the day than others, according to the latest findings from the PREDICT study.

The results, published in Nature Metabolism, explain why some people struggle to lose weight, even on calorie-controlled diets, and highlight the importance of understanding personal metabolism when it comes to diet and health.

Dr Sarah Berry from King’s College London said:

“It has long been suspected that blood sugar levels play an important role in controlling hunger, but the results from previous studies have been inconclusive. We’ve now shown that sugar dips are a better predictor of hunger and subsequent calorie intake than the initial blood sugar peak response after eating, changing how we think about the relationship between blood sugar levels and the food we eat.”

The research

PREDICT is the largest ongoing nutritional research programme in the world that looks at responses to food in real life settings.

The research team collected detailed data about blood sugar responses and other markers of health from 1,070 people after eating standardised breakfasts and freely chosen meals over a two-week period, adding up to more than 8,000 breakfasts and 70,000 meals in total.

Participants wore stick-on continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) to measure their blood sugar levels over the entire duration of the study. They also recorded levels of hunger and alertness using a phone app, along with exactly when and what they ate over the day.

Previous studies looking at blood sugar after eating have focused on the way that levels rise and fall in the first two hours after a meal, known as a blood sugar peak. After analysing the data however, the PREDICT team noticed that some people experienced significant ‘sugar dips’ 2-4 hours after this initial peak, where their blood sugar levels fell rapidly below baseline before coming back up.

Big dippers had a 9% increase in hunger, and waited around half an hour less, on average, before their next meal than little dippers, even though they ate exactly the same meals.

Big dippers also ate 75 more calories in the 3-4 hours after breakfast and around 312 calories more over the whole day than little dippers. This kind of pattern could potentially turn into 20 pounds of weight gain over a year.

Professor Ana Valdes from the School of Medicine at the University of Nottingham, who led the study team, said:

“Many people struggle to lose weight and keep it off, and just a few hundred extra calories every day can add up to several pounds of weight gain over a year. Our discovery that the size of sugar dips after eating has such a big impact on hunger and appetite has great potential for helping people understand and control their weight and long-term health.”

Everyone is different

Comparing what happens when participants eat the same test meals revealed large variations in blood sugar responses between people. The researchers also found no correlation between age, bodyweight or BMI and being a big or little dipper, although males had slightly larger dips than females on average.

There was also some variability in the size of the dips experienced by each person in response to eating the same meals on different days, suggesting that whether you’re a dipper or not depends on individual differences in metabolism, as well as the day-to-day effects of meal choices and activity levels.

Tim Spector, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College London and scientific co-founder of ZOE, concluded:

“Food is complex and humans are complicated, but our research is finally starting to open up the black box between diet and health. We’re excited to have been able to turn this cutting-edge science into an at-home nutrition and microbiome test so that everyone has the opportunity to discover their unique responses to food to best support their metabolism and gut health.”