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I ordered the same pizza twice. Two Friday nights, two slices each time, the same shop and the same toppings. On the first night the pizza was the whole meal. On the second I ate a plain green salad first, finished it, waited a few minutes, then started on the pizza. The first night peaked at 55 points. The second at 34.
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-38%
Smaller peak from a bowl of leaves
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Pizza on its own |
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Salad first, then pizza |
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One person's glucose monitor, the same order on two Fridays, over three hours
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This is one person's experiment, not medical advice. Everyone's body responds differently.
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🍕
Pizza alone
+55
Point rise
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-38%
Lower peak
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🥗
Salad, then pizza
+34
Point rise
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Fiber reaches your stomach first and turns the exit into a slow one. Everything that follows it, including a lot of dough, has to leave through the same narrowed door. The salad also sits there taking up room, which is the unglamorous half of the effect. I ate two slices on both nights because I had decided to, but the second night I wanted the third slice less. In other words, the leaves did two jobs. One of them is chemistry and the other is just space. Nobody told me to eat a salad before pizza. They told me to eat the salad instead of it.
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Your mission this week
The bowl before the box
Costs you four minutes
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Make it boring and make it first
Leaves, a bit of oil, whatever is in the drawer. It does not need to be good. It needs to be eaten before the pizza arrives.
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Finish it before you open the box
Not alongside. The gap is where the effect lives, and the box being shut helps more than willpower does.
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Then eat the pizza you were going to eat
The same number of slices. This is not a trick for eating less, although that may happen on its own.
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Your first win
One pizza night this week that starts with a bowl of something green.
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Where this comes from: Two studies sit behind this. In 2015, Weill Cornell researchers put eleven people with type 2 diabetes through the same meal in two orders, and found glucose about 29 percent lower at thirty minutes and 37 percent lower at sixty when vegetables and protein came first. In 2018, in Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, the same group tested fifteen people with prediabetes and found that protein and vegetables first cut the glucose exposure by 38.8 percent against carbohydrate first. My 38 percent sits almost exactly on that second number, which is a coincidence worth being honest about: one person on two Fridays is not a trial. This may support a steadier evening rather than promise one. |
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They said eat salad instead of pizza.
The research said before.
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Quick poll
What usually goes in first on a takeaway night?
Tap yours. The split on this one tends to surprise people.
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Keep the pizza night
Jackie
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