Your dinner date may be doing more than keeping you company — they might also be keeping your blood sugar in check.
When you eat sweets, white rice, or bread (aka “simple carbs”) your body breaks them down fast and sugar gets absorbed into your blood stream, making the sugar content in your blood spike.
This might feel like a burst of energy with a sharp downhill “crash” of fatigue — plus cravings, thirst, urination, and headache. Over time, this can have effects on mental health, energy, mood and sleep.
Over time, it even increases your risk of chronic diseases like diabetes, which make it even harder to control blood sugar.
New research suggests having a sweetheart nearby may help temper that natural spike — potentially nudging us, ever so slightly, toward better health.
Not only that, loved ones’ presence seem to also help us regulate our body temperature, respond to stress, and soothe infant meltdowns faster. Here’s what researchers uncovered.
Love and bread
Researchers from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem asked 54 couples to eat 50 grams of white bread twice: once on their own, and once together. Researchers measured the participants blood sugar after two hours to see how they reacted each time.
Eating the same amount of bread — about two slices — created a much smaller blood sugar responses when the partner was present. Eating with a partner caused an average 24% lower total glucose response.
And though some spike was inevitable, eating with a partner helped blood sugar return to normal faster.
Authors float the theory that social buffering might be at play — a phenomenon when a loved one reduces stress responses. Stress is one way blood spikes can be more extreme.
Soothing love
The researchers put a number of couples through two other challenges to see how they’d react.
First was cold exposure—they had participants stand in a 54°F room for five minutes, then moved to a pleasantly warm room (77°F) to recover.
When romantic partners were present, researchers found skin temperature dropped less and return to baseline quicker, compared to when participants did the challenge alone.
Second, the couples got a mild electric shock and researchers measured sweat as a metric for physiological stress. Again, when partners were present, the stress response was smaller and shorter-lived.
Finally, researchers had babies listen to a startling sound. If their mothers were around to hold and talk to them, they calmed down quicker compared to when mothers were in a separate room.
What do these experiments tell us?
As the researchers suggest, stress may be part of the story. The presence of a loved one — a mother for a baby or a romantic partner for an adult — can help the body recover from a stressful event.
But that return to equilibrium, known as homeostasis, isn’t limited to stress. The body is constantly working to keep everything from temperature to blood sugar within a healthy range, and these results suggest being around a love one helps all around.
Researchers note that while results showed that partners helped this regulation on average, there was a lot of variation between individuals and couples.
Some couples saw huge benefits being around each other, while some were more neutral — others actually regulated worse when their partner was around. They suggest exploring why different relationships affect regulation differently in future research.
