Does drinking coffee before breakfast increase insulin sensitivity?

Sometimes, when I don’t feel like eating breakfast or can’t because of time constraints, I’ll grab a cup of black coffee instead. Then I would eat about 2-3 hours later.

This is a common habit found in the intermittent fasting crowd.

I was curious about the health effects of this approach and stumbled upon this paper where they concluded that drinking coffee before breakfast reduces glucose tolerance and might cause hectic blood sugar levels throughout the day.

But this study is about people who are sleep deprived. It could be that this effect is only present for people with sleep deprivation.

What are you guys’ thoughts on this?

The paper you linked showed that there aren’t any clinically significant differences in oral glucose tolerance test results in any of the three groups, thus suggesting against there being a harmful effect of coffee on blood sugar. The peak blood sugar and insulin levels are not different enough for me to care about or predict changes in insulin sensitivity modification apart from what we already know, poor sleep is a significant risk factor for health problems. We also know that caffeine ingestion can, in the short term, liberalize energy sources (like stored glycogen) for fueling activity. We also have an overwhelming amount of data showing regular coffee consumption can have a number of modest health benefits, including type 2 diabetes risk reduction .This includes large swaths of the population who are likely sleep deprived.

Caffeine podcast

Continuous Glucose Monitors Podcast

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