Are Oats Bad for Blood Sugar? The Truth About Glucose Spikes

The Glucose Goddess is still trying to “flatten the curve” — but someone please tell her we’re not in 2020 anymore. Here’s what you actually need to know about blood sugar spikes and your oat milk flat white.

How did we get here? Where overnight oats, overnight, became public enemy #1?

It started with a so-called goddess and her graphs. No nutrition qualifications — just a background in biochemistry, a knack for storytelling, and a very Instagrammable data set. Her thing? Wearing a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) and sharing colourful blood sugar graphs to show how different foods affect her body. A handful of personal experiments and a few million followers later, and suddenly her glucose curves became gospel.

To the untrained eye, her graphs look scientific. But they rarely come with context — or actual science. Just a single time point from a self-experiment, followed by a sweeping conclusion:

Your blood sugar went up: Must be bad.
Went up a lot: Definitely bad.

Ultimately, her message is simple: the higher the glucose response, the worse the food. Cue a dramatic little curve after a bowl of porridge, and suddenly oats weren’t the slow-release, fibre-filled breakfast staple we thought they were — they were a one-way ticket to whole body inflammation, metabolic dysfunction... and social exclusion, at this rate.

Because in 2025, what you eat has basically become a personality trait — and an indicator of your moral high ground. God forbid you have a banana on its own or — heaven help you — order an oat milk flat white. You’ll be labelled reckless at best, ill-informed at worst — as if you aren’t aware of just how damaging oat milk (sorry, “starch water”) can be for your health.

But this new handbook we’ve been given on “balancing blood sugar” is reductive of human physiology and hugely misleading. A “rise” in your blood glucose level isn’t a red flag for a healthy person. It’s a sign your body is responding exactly as it should.

So let’s break down the science of these glucose “spikes” — and bring oats back into breakfast rotation, where they belong.

To keep reading, head over to Dr. Emily Prpa’s Substack and dive into the full post.

Want more real talk on hormones, gut health, and what your period might actually be trying to tell you? Subscribe for weekly insights—delivered straight to your inbox.

N.B. This content is for educational purposes only and isn’t a substitute for medical advice.
Photo credit