Public release date: 5-Sep-2007

If you eat the right grains for breakfast, such as whole-grain barley or rye, the regulation of your blood sugar is facilitated after breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was previously not known that certain whole-grain products have this effect all day. This is due to a combination of low GI (glycemic index) and certain type of indigestible carbohydrates that occur in certain grain products. The findings are presented in a dissertation from the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University. The dissertation shows that even people who have had a breakfast low in GI find it easier to concentrate for the rest of the morning.

Barley evinced clearly the best results of the four types of grain. In her test, Anne used boiled grains and whole grains in bread. But when the grain was ground into porridge, the effect was weakened, since key structures were then destroyed, which had a negative effect on both GI and the content of resistant starch. On the other hand, splitting the grain worked fine.

Anne Nilsson also studied the connection between mental acuity and blood sugar levels after meals. Trial subjects were given experimental breakfasts with low and high GI, respectively, and afterwards they were asked to perform mental acuity tests. It turned out that subjects who had eaten low GI breakfasts could concentrate better and had a better working memory (a type of short-term memory) than the other group. These experiments also showed that healthy individuals with low glucose tolerance, that is with high rises in blood sugar than average following a meal, generally performed less well.

“The findings indicate that people with great fluctuations in their levels of blood sugar run a greater risk of having a generally lower cognitive ability,” says Anne Nilsson.