Sugar spikes: why the same biryani hits two people completely differently

A spike is not one number set by the food alone. It is a tug-of-war, and several forces pull on the rope.

This is why two people — or the same person on two different days — get different curves from one recipe. The food sets the stage; the context writes the result.

These are approximate effects on the after-meal peak, drawn from controlled studies. Most cost nothing.

The headline finding from continuous monitors: the response to an identical meal can vary up to tenfold between two healthy people. There is no universal 'good' or 'bad' food — your own response is the number that matters.

Myth 1 — Only sweet food spikes your sugar.

Refined carbs spike just as hard — white rice, maida, biscuits. So do late timing, stress and bad sleep, with no sugar at all.

Myth 2 — The same food does the same thing to everyone.

Continuous monitors show up to tenfold variation between people on an identical meal. Your gut, sleep and last meal all shape it. Personal response beats any chart.

Myth 3 — Fresh juice is a healthy way to start the day.

Liquid sugar with no fibre is the steepest spike there is. A glass of orange juice delivers three oranges' sugar in a minute. The whole fruit is a different food.

Myth 4 — One cheat meal undoes everything.

A single meal is something a healthy body handles. It is the weekly pattern — late, stressed, unwalked meals — that adds up. Guilt is not useful; awareness is.

Myth 5 — 'Diet' drinks are completely safe.

They barely move glucose in the moment, true. But the long-term effects on gut bacteria and cravings are unclear. Water is still the better default.

Myth 6 — Diabetics must never eat fruit.

Whole fruit, in a sensible portion with some protein, is fine for most. Juice and sweetened 'fruit' products are the real problem.

Myth 7 — Any spike is dangerous.

A modest rise after a meal is normal physiology. It is the repeated tall spikes and crashes that wear the system down, not every bump.

Not a new diet. The same food, eaten smarter. Pick one or two to start.

See a doctor ifyour fasting sugar is 126 or higher on more than one check, your HbA1c is 6.5% or above, you get shaky and confused two to four hours after meals, or you have constant thirst, frequent urination and unexplained weight loss — these need testing, not tinkering.

Follow one fortnight — it teaches the lesson better than any rule.

The puzzle. Sunita, 46, in Jaipur, is told her fasting sugar is 'borderline' at 108. She is baffled — she eats simple home food, hardly any mithai. Her doctor daughter puts a glucose monitor on her arm for two weeks and asks her to change nothing at first, just watch.

Week one, watching. The graph tells on her. The 8 a.m. chai with two biscuits sends her sugar high, then crashes it — there is the 11 a.m. craving she blamed on willpower. Her 10 p.m. dinner spikes higher than the very same dal-rice eaten at lunch. A 'simple' meal eaten rice-first, sitting down, climbs steeply.

Week two, nudging. Now they change only how, not what. She eats her sabzi and dal before the rice. She walks ten minutes after dinner. She moves dinner to 8 p.m. and swaps the biscuits for dahi. The same foods, the same kitchen.

The graph flattens. The tall morning spike shrinks; the afternoon crash and craving fade; the night-time peak comes down. Nothing was forbidden. She simply saw what her body was doing and adjusted the context around the food.

That is the lesson in one fortnight: she did not need a new diet, only new eyes.

Step back, and the spike stops looking like a verdict on a food and starts looking like a conversation you can join. For years the advice was a list: this food good, that food bad. The continuous monitor quietly demolished that. The same banana, the same biryani, lands differently in different bodies and on different days — so the useful question is not 'is this food bad?' but 'how do I eat it?'

This matters most in India, where the backdrop is 101 million people with diabetes and 136 million more with prediabetes (ICMR-INDIAB, Lancet 2023), and where the highest-spike habits — chai-biscuit mornings, 10 p.m. dinners, juice for the children — are woven into daily life. The levers that flatten the curve are not expensive imports. They are old and local: eat your sabzi first, walk your hundred steps, do not dine at midnight.

The deeper lesson is one of agency. A 'borderline' report is not a sentence; it is information, arriving while there is still room to act. Understanding that the spike is the meal plus its context hands a measure of control back to the person holding the plate — and over years, those small daily choices shape the curve, and the future, far more than any single food ever could.