Breakfast can set the tone for your entire day. And, by choosing some foods over others, you could be setting your hormones up for success.
“Not all hormones can be affected by diet, but some important ones can,” Dr. Divya Yogi-Morren, an endocrinologist at Cleveland Clinic, tells TODAY.com. “The No. 1 hormone that can be affected by diet is insulin.”
The body needs insulin in order to process and store sugar from food for energy. If the body becomes resistant to insulin, it begins to require more insulin to do that job. The body processes some foods, like simple sugars, more quickly, thus raising blood sugar levels faster and putting more strain on the pancreas to produce the insulin needed to take care of that sugar.
Reducing simple sugars, and monitoring and limiting the amount of high-fiber carbohydrates in the diet can be helpful for people with diabetes and prediabetes, Dr. Thomas Donner, endocrinologist and director of the Johns Hopkins Diabetes Center, tells TODAY.com.
Doing so will “lessen the demand on the pancreas to produce insulin, (which) helps keep blood sugar levels in a more normal range,” Donner explains.
While it’s most helpful for people with insulin resistance, prediabetes and diabetes to keep these issues in mind, the experts that TODAY.com spoke to recommend that everyone generally stick to foods that have a lower glycemic index, meaning they raise blood sugar in a slower, steadier way.
“The higher the glycemic index, the quicker (a food) raises the sugar in the bloodstream,” Dr. Kavya Mekala, endocrinologist and associate professor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, tells TODAY.com. And it’s no surprise that diets popular among medical professionals, like the Mediterranean, DASH and MIND diets, also steer clear of high-glycemic index foods, she says.
In addition to insulin, food choices can indirectly affect reproductive hormones, like estrogen, progesterone and testosterone, Donner says. Insulin resistance is also thought to play a…
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