Does the order in which you eat your food affect your digestion?

Eating protein or fibre first and carbohydrates only afterwards has a measurable effect on your blood sugar after a meal. In people with type 2 diabetes, the blood sugar rise fell considerably when they ate fish or meat first and rice only afterwards. In healthy people this effect was smaller and not statistically significant.

Gastric emptying plays a major role here. When meat or fish was eaten first, the stomach contents stayed in the stomach much longer: half of the stomach contents had emptied after roughly 83 minutes, compared with 30 minutes when rice was eaten first. That delay causes sugars to be absorbed into the blood more slowly.

Eating protein as the first course also stimulates the production of the gut hormone GLP-1, which helps regulate blood sugar and produces a feeling of fullness. In the available studies, meat had a stronger effect on GLP-1 than fish. There is, however, a caveat: meat simultaneously raises another gut hormone, GIP, which promotes fat storage in adipose tissue. Whether this leads to weight gain in the long term has not yet been demonstrated in long-term studies.

Eating fibre first also lowers the blood sugar peak, but does not stimulate GLP-1. Researchers suggest that combining fibre with protein or fat before carbohydrates could have an additional effect, but the clinical evidence for this is still thin.

Even how you eat counts. A small study in 11 healthy volunteers showed that eating rice with chopsticks produced a lower blood sugar peak than eating with a spoon (glycaemic index 68 versus 81), probably because people take in less food per bite and chew for longer. This is preliminary knowledge from a very small study.