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According to the small study conducted at the University of Guelph in Ontario, drinking caffeinated coffee an hour before eating a bowl of cereal can significantly affect the body’s blood-sugar response. The researchers recruited 10 healthy men. On different occasions they drank decaffeinated coffee or caffeinated coffee one hour before eating the cereal. Two cereals were involved in the study – Kellogg’s All-Bran, considered to have a low glycemic index, and Kellogg’s Crispix, which is considered a high glycemic index cereal.

“If you have caffeinated coffee what you find is that the insulin levels go higher than they would’ve if you didn’t have the caffeinated coffee with that particular cereal,” said Terry Graham, chair of the department of human health and nutritional sciences. Graham has been working with caffeine and insulin resistance in the lab for more than a decade.

“When you got up, you had your coffee and then you thought, ‘Well, I had better behave myself and I’ll have All-Bran,’ and in fact the blood-sugar response to the All-Bran exceeded what the subjects showed if they had decaf and Crispix,” he said. “So by simply combining what you might think of as a more optimal cereal with coffee ended up giving you a response that was larger than what you would have expected from the less optimal cereal.” He added that caffeine levels just barely start to go down in a person three hours after drinking coffee. 

The research paper was published online last week by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Although, it calls for more research in the area and also notes a number of limitations to the study.