Sun, Mar-17-19, 06:26
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Forum Moderator
Posts: 25,662
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Plan: Primal/P:E
Stats: 171/145/145
BF:
Progress: 100%
Location: Southern Ontario, Canada
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What RDN/CDE Lily Nichols Learned From Wearing a CGM
I found this via Nina Teicholz's twitter:
CGM Experiment: What I Learned As A Non-Diabetic From Wearing A Continuous Glucose Monitor
TL;DR: It's pretty much what most of us would expect. You might not catch BG spikes with a finger stick glucometer.
Quote:
I was surprised after eating a big bowl of curry with chicken and vegetables and the tiniest serving of white rice (we’re talking ⅓ cup, friends), to see my blood sugar spike to the 130’s.
Even though the rice was leftover (therefore had been cooled for >12 hours, which converts a portion of the starch into “resistant starch”, which is praised as healthful for our microbiome and less-impactful on blood sugar levels), it clearly still spiked my blood sugar.
I repeated the same Thai food leftover meal the next day, just without the rice (so I’m sure there was still hidden sugar in the curry) and my highest peak was only 105. White rice and I are apparently not friends, even in portions that provide only 20 grams of carbs.
Sorry, everyone who’s #teamwhiterice. It doesn’t work for me.
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Next, her "healthy" oatmeal experiment, and she specifies that "All things considered, this was NOT a large bowl of oatmeal and it was essentially NOT sweet, despite adding a little honey. (I say this to point out that the average person adds A LOT of extra sweeteners to their oatmeal, either with sugar/honey or dried fruit. My version would be unpalatable to many people.)"
Quote:
At first, I thought my blood sugar was doing ok after the oatmeal, but I then watched with horror on my Freestyle Libre as the readings climbed. When you scan the sensor, the Freestyle Libre reader shows an arrow next to the numerical reading with an up, down, level, or slightly up/down error, indicating your real time blood sugar trends. This was the ONLY time during the entire 10 days that I saw the straight up arrow, indicating my blood sugar was rising FAST.
My blood sugar went from 74 to a peak of 178 in an hour. By two hours, I was down to the 120s and by three hours, finally back down to 100.
What was interesting, though, is that I got ravenously hungry when my blood sugar started plummeting.
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Quote:
As you can recall, as long as blood sugar is back down to 140 mg/dl by two hours after eating, then you’re supposedly “in the clear” by conventional guidelines for diabetes/prediabetes. If a study has people measure their blood sugar only at 2 hours, you’re likely to miss the peak glycemic response in many people. Moreover, different people peak at different times, so without a million finger pricks or CGM, the results aren’t going to be very meaningful. (...) Imagine if you could go to the doctor, have a CGM sensor inserted on the spot, then return in 2 weeks to have your data analyzed and graphed using the criteria in this study. It would give us a much more nuanced look into your blood sugar regulation. It would also reveal what foods are great for your blood sugar and conversely, which ones are a glycemic disaster. This would be preventative medicine. Intervene before blood sugar levels are consistently in the diabetic range, before insulin resistance gets too severe, and before beta cell burnout.
Then again, this would be a royal pain for practitioners/insurance companies who like the black and white nature of single tests. I don’t think I’ll hold my breath waiting for this to become the standard of care.
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Dr Gary Fettke's response, which gives me hope:
Quote:
Wearing a CGM is a game changer for everyone, with or without diabetes. When they become part of smart watches - game over for cereal and processed food industries.
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Let's cross our fingers.
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