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Comment by SpikeDad | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't for me. Individual anecdotal stories aren't evidence but without consistent feedback it's easy to get back into poor habits. When I eat a Twizzler and see my blood glucose spike at 180-200 FOR 1 TWIZZLER then it's the feedback I need.

It's no different to me than frequent weighings. I'm sure some people don't need or want the feedback but for me it's essential.

And using a CGM (I use 14 day Lifestyle) I can get readings whenever I want and also get data like trends that I can't get from finger sticks. I can see my blood glucose overnight for example which helps me tailor my meds and food to avoid the common overnight glucose rise that's pretty common.

So sorry NYTimes article but I'm going to disagree. I don't think enough people are encouraged to use CGM for example so that some real data can be extracted on diet compliance.

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I'm glad you found something that works for you, but this is massively over-complicated for almost everyone.

Constant glucose tracking is interesting, but completely unnecessary. EDIT - For most healthy individuals.

It's like my father-in-law who obsesses over vitamins while he ignores being ~40 pounds overweight - he needs to simply eat less & move more, not keep reading articles until he uncovers some magic combination of micronutrients.

Beef spikes insulin just as much as rice does. Acute insulin spikes are not bad, and can be very beneficial. Chronically elevated insulin is not good, but it's almost always simple to address that - just eat less, less often.

But people seem to prefer to focus on complicating easy things instead of consistently doing simple but difficult things.

As a type 1 diabetic, I can tell you beef does not spike blood glucose and resulting insulin response just as much as rice as does. Protein usually takes about half the dosage for the same amount of grams (ie 10g of carbs / 5g of protein), and it does it more slowly. For many type 1 diabetics on non low-carb diets, protein is eaten in small enough amounts with large enough amounts of carbs that you usually don't factor it into your dosage.

Your point is valid, I should have specified "in most healthy individuals".

https://watermark.silverchair.com/1264.pdf?token=AQECAHi208B....

There is absolutely no way beef spikes insulin as much as rice does. Beef has zero carbohydrates and while some protein does convert to glucose, it is a slow process and thus the insulin response will still be much less than if one consumed the equivalent of carbohydrate in rice. This is further slowed by digesting the fat in the beef.

""Between 50–60% of protein becomes glucose and enters the bloodstream about 3–4 hours after eaten." Perhaps 50–60% of protein goes through the process of gluconeogenesis in the liver, but virtually none of this glucose enters into the general circulation."

http://journal.diabetes.org/diabetesspectrum/00v13n3/pg132.h...

Are you suggesting that insulin only responds to carbohydrate intake? I understand insulin plays an important role in shuttling all macronutrients from the GI tract into tissues, even if that action is somewhat different for fats, proteins, and carbs. (ie insulin binds to fat cells to reduce fat mobilization in a fed state)

Here you can see while its not the exact same, the insulin scores of beef & rice (brown especially) are very close to each other. Definitely much closer than most popular culture advice would suggest.

But it should also be said that this is for healthy individuals.

https://watermark.silverchair.com/1264.pdf?token=AQECAHi208B....

For healthy individuals - I agree 100%.

Beef spikes insulin as much as rice? Well not for me (and I suspect most people). I can eat a steak without raising my blood glucose at all - one bowl of rice and it jumps 100mg/dl.

There's not a lot of good data on glucose spikes. It's a discussion I've had with my endocrinologist a number of times. He suspects it's not bad for occasional incidents as long as A1C isn't affected but again it's not been studied yet.

Sure, eat less. It's that easy - I guess the 90% of people overweight are just stupid.

You last statement is very true however. People and doctors want to do the simple thing. For doctors it's meds and then when they don't work well enough it's insulin and then more and more insulin.

That's a hamster wheel that people need to get off.

I appreciate you sharing your thoughts with your doctor. I should have presented it as: “in this linked experiment, beef rose circulating insulin about as much as brown rice did”.

Oh and I didn’t mean to suggest fat people are lazy, eating less is simple, but not easy at all. That’s why I think people tend to end up complicating the easy stuff (and I agree meds can be an example of that) instead of doing the simple but difficult stuff.

There might be other insights that can be gathered from the data that a CGM provides though. Even for healthy individuals.

>Beef spikes insulin just as much as rice does.

Citation?

https://watermark.silverchair.com/1264.pdf?token=AQECAHi208B....

The NYTimes article isn't about continuous glucose monitoring.

Data drives me to do better.

This is the point. If you don't use the additional info somehow -- like eating or exercising differently based on info like BG fingersticks -- merely adding more info achieves zero.

That should be the takeaway lesson from this study. Just because some people stuck their fingers and gathered BG numbers three times a day does not mean they acted on that info to change their health. Until health pros make this clear to patients, that they need to actually use this info to adapt their lifestyle on a daily basis, there's simply no point in gathering daily info like this. And certainly not at a frequency of 3 or 4 times a day.

Once you've dialed in your lifestyle into regular eating and exercise habits, repeatedly gathering daily numbers is redundant overkill. Gathering BG numbers no more than one day a week should suffice, just to confirm you remain homeostatic.

Gathering info, by itself, changes nothing.

(BTW, I've had T2D for 15 years now. So I've walked the walk.)

Unless it misleads you. One can "lose" 2 lbs...by weighing before drinking water after a run. Did you really lose 2 lbs?

If you're allowing a single data point to have that much power over what or how you think, you've already lost. Especially if you decide to ignore context like "I just lost water by running and I haven't had anything to drink yet", or even important variables like time of day. The number by itself is meaningless. Data (as in a ton of data points) with context can be incredibly useful. Don't blame the tool if you don't learn how to use it properly.

Oh to be blessed with decent analytical intelligence. Not everyone is, however.

Weight loss isn't really a good analogy. It's much more about trends over time than any individual data point.

When we're talking about diabetics and blood sugar, one data point could be the difference between life and death.

If you're misled by thinking you lost 2 pounds when instead you just lost some water, you are missing some pretty essential data.

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