What Can a Diabetic Eat at Night, and for Breakfast?

You can eat at night, and you can eat a full Nigerian breakfast. Nobody is asking you to go to bed hungry.

What decides your morning reading is not the clock, it is what you put in the cup.

The smooth bowl of pap you have trusted for years is one of the fastest foods that turns to sugar, while the akara and moi moi you were warned about are among the safest.

Your breakfast has been the wrong way round, and that is not your fault. Nobody ever told you the right thing.

Is pap good for diabetes?

Not on its own, and not the way it is usually served. Pap scores 92. Foods are given a score from 0 to 100 for how fast they turn into sugar inside you, and anything above 70 is at the fast end.

At 92, pap sits near the very top. It is smooth corn starch with the rough part strained out, so almost nothing is left to slow it down.

Yellow pap, white pap, corn pap and ogi baba all behave the same way, so no version of it is the safer one. The sugar or condensed milk on top only adds to it.

None of that means you never touch pap again. One small cup, about 200ml, made with water and no sugar, about two times a week. Put moi moi or akara beside it, because the 92 comes down once other food is combined with it.

Is custard or Golden Morn better for a diabetic?

Custard is the same story under a different name, and the milk and sugar in it is what makes it worse. Treat it the same way.

One small cup of about 200ml, water, no sugar, two times a week. Golden Morn is a little slower than both pap and custard, though it carries sugar, so the size matters.

Four tablespoons of the dry cereal, about 40g, with milk that has no sugar. Milo, Bournvita and Ovaltine are sweet drinks whatever the tin says, and no size of them works for you.

What is the best breakfast for a diabetic in Nigeria?

Beans, in the morning, and this is the turn nobody tells you about. The brown honey beans that moi moi and akara are made from scores 29, and the African yam bean is slower still at 17. Against pap at 92, that is the difference between the fastest end and the safest end of everything you eat.

So the wrap of moi moi you thought was heavy is one of the best breakfasts in the country. One wrap, about the size of your palm, roughly 150g. It stands on its own or with a little salad.

Akara is the same beans, and the beans is not the problem. The oil it is fried in is the only cost. Three small balls, about 90g. Eat them with vegetables rather than with pap, because the pap is the fast half of that famous pair.

If you would rather have a cereal, ordinary rolled oats are on your side. Half a cup of the dry oats, 40g, measured before you cook it, made with water, with about ten nuts on top.

How often can you eat beans in the morning?

About four times a week, even though it treats you this well. Slow is not the same as free, and beans still carries starch inside it. Four mornings leaves room for the other slow foods your body needs.

Can a diabetic eat late at night?

Yes, you can. Eating late does not harm you by itself, and going to bed on an empty stomach can leave your sugar swinging the other way, which is worse. The idea that night eating is forbidden has cost plenty of people their dinner for no gain.

What matters is what you choose. A fast food eaten at ten in the evening sits in you for hours with nothing to burn it off, so night is the worst time for the things that were already the worst.

Bread, pap, garri and a sweet drink belong to the daytime if they belong anywhere.

What can you eat at night if you are hungry?

Reach for the foods that carry no starch. Two or three whole garden eggs. One or two boiled eggs. About ten groundnuts. A wrap of moi moi if you want something that holds you until morning. All of these fill you and leave your sugar steady while you sleep.

Keep it to one of them, not a second dinner, and eat it because you are hungry rather than out of habit.

Why is your blood sugar high in the morning?

Sometimes it is the pap or the bread from the night before. Often it is nothing you did at all. Your body releases its own hormones in the early hours, and those hormones tell your liver to send out sugar while you are still asleep.

The Cleveland Clinic explains that this happens between about 3am and 8am, even in people who ate nothing after dinner.

So a high morning number is not proof that you failed. Take it to your doctor rather than to your own conscience. What you can do is make your evening food heavier on fish, meat or egg and lighter on the starch, which is one of the things doctors suggest for it.

What if you have high blood pressure or cholesterol as well?

Plenty of people carry more than diabetes, and almost nobody answers this part. Akara is fried, so if your pressure or your cholesterol is being watched too, keep to the three balls, use less oil, and let steamed moi moi be your usual choice.

The condensed and evaporated milk in custard and tea is heavy with both fat and sugar, so switch to milk with no sugar. Go easy on the salt at night too, because it lifts your pressure and gives your kidneys extra work on a day your sugar is behaving perfectly well.

What about everything else you eat?

Your breakfast is three or four foods. Your week is more than twenty, and each has a number, a size and a count of its own.

The answer moves again the moment two of them meet, the way slow akara and fast pap end up high together. Nobody can hold all of that in their head, and you should not have to.

That is the gap GluFloat was built to close. You type in a food and it tells you where you stand, the size to keep to and what to eat it with, then you build a whole meal and watch the answer change as you swap things around.

You can try it free, and it does not ask for a card, so start with whatever you are having in the morning.

Now listen, there is nothing here to be afraid of. Turn your morning the right way round, and eat something small and starch free when the night hunger comes.