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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

If the needle in the CGM bothers you, don't let it. It's a quick, painless jab with a tiny needle at the beginning and then the needle comes out. The part that stays in your body is just a flexible filament made of plastic.

I did this experiment as well, and the main thing it did was completely stop me from snacking. My habits got better because I could see how my BG could never return to baseline if I allowed myself to snack between meals.

Other than that, it was also interesting to see certain things would badly spike my BG and other things wouldn't, and they weren't always what you'd expect. A lot of "keto" and "diabetic-friendly" products are terrible for most people's BG and were for mine. I found that some things, like black tea, actually made my BG drop as well.

Overall it's worth doing at least once.

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That's good to know. I think my aversion to needles is so strong that it stopped me from going beyond basic research. Bad on me.

But this does sounds like an interesting thing to try, if only to get a better idea of how my body works.

I've been tracking walking vs. resting heart rate, HRV, blood oxygen levels, and sleep for a few years using the Apple Watch, and while I know these measurements are imperfect, they've helped me better understand the impact of certain choices.

There's something that seems really beneficial about feeding my brain data about myself as a way to do the healthier things I've always wanted to want to do. The more data I have, the easier it feels to implement positive habit changes in a way that doesn't involve sheer willpower. There's something very satisfying about seeing the very tangible changes on a graph over time that indicate better health, even when it doesn't feel like the changes have done anything noticeable yet.

My understanding is that for healthy individuals, spiking blood glucose levels is not a problem. Did you get in to any of the research on that? Glucose is a problem for diabetics because they can’t regulate it, but healthy people can. At least this is loosely what I have heard, somewhat third hand. Any information is appreciated.

Not a doctor, but from what I have seen, there is a healthy amount of spiking from eating normal foods, but our modern diets are so sugar and carb heavy that the glucose spikes are way outside the range that our bodies evolved to handle. Hunter gatherers would maybe eat some berries here (much smaller and less sweet than modern berries) and there. The modern human eating pizza, tons of bread, ice cream, soda, etc. creates such massive glucose spikes that they are unhealthy and unsustainable for the pancreas to handle for 60+ years.

Again, not a doctor and not sure if this is accurate, but this is my very limited understanding

> Hunter gatherers would maybe eat some berries here (much smaller and less sweet than modern berries) and there.

Archaic humans had access to plenty of wild fruit that were high in sugar and tubers that were high in complex carbs. They even had access to concentrated forms of sugar like sugarcane and honey.

They obviously didn't have refined sugars in everything they eat like we do but that they had access to limited sugar in the form of berries is a persistent myth. They would have been exposed to large glucose spikes regularly whenever they came upon a new tree that was in season while migrating.

We live 2x-3x longer than we used to. We should take the best possible care of our bodies.

Only as a statistical average. Hunter gatherers who survived past age 5 had a good chance of living into their 60s and 70s.

There would be skeletal evidence of that. The oldest remains of early humans points to 35-40 year olds with high child mortality rates per https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/people-lived-up-to-40-year...

Not to mention humans 150 years ago who ate plenty of bread and still didn't have the problems we have with obesity and diabetes. Or even 50 years ago...

That could also be because a fair amount of the bread in supermarkets today is closer to confectionary than homemade sourdough.

light bread starts turning into sugar almost instantly in the mouth and stomach. It's only one step removed and saliva can break it down quickly because it has amylase. Sour dough and whole wheat/grain breads tend to break down a bit slower. You can freeze bread overnight and make it a bit more "resistant" to breaking down quickly and I pretty much do this with all my breads along with toasting them a bit for sandwiches. Pasta can similarly have its glycemic index lowered by first making it "cold"

Do you mean that they need to be cold when they are consumed, or is it the process of freezing itself that does something, even if it's later reheated?

The process of cooling down converts starches in rice, pasta, potatoes etc... to a more resistant forms that your body cannot process easily.

Does chilling also work to convert bread starches into resistant ones, or does it only work for rice and potatoes?

GP mentioned bread specifically. I looked up some studies, and they are in agreement: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17426743/

A starch is a starch.

However, this study seems to compare freshly baked bread to a frozen/toasted one.

I'd guess that the difference will be smaller when regular store-bought bread is used instead.

They don’t need to be cold when consumed.

That’s not really a fair statement. Many problem who would die of diabetes today would have died of something else 200 years ago long before the diabetes got them. Non-juvenile diabetes is a slow killer, it’s really hard for it to kill you before the age of reproduction.

A diagnosis today that is imminently manageable like asthma was far more readily in a world without antibiotics, steroids, or even medical oxygen.

Even something like a CPAP that many of us take for granted has only been readily available for 30 years or so.

Plus, diabetes is much like AIDS in that it’s more of a systemic thing than acute. It doesn’t really have symptoms that kill you. It just slowly weakens your body until your heart gives in, or you have a serious infection, or something like that. No one dies “of” diabetes, they die with it.

They also moved around more than most people do today. Most of us are stuck sitting pretty much all day in front of a computer.

fruit and berries do have sugars but in their wild state they tend to have much less than their modern equivalents bred to be sweeter and tastier. Even then they still typically are 75-95% water and often have some fiber, antioxidants, and vitamins which all can help with inflammation unlike snickers bars.

I have better life expectancy then them.

It's not really that the pancreas itself can't handle it (though this may be true also). What happens is that having high blood glucose, even if it's not continuously high, is just bad for you by virtue of the high concentration of glucose in your blood. Having high blood glucose leads to the creation of "Advanced Glycation Endproducts" (AGEs) which bind to certain receptors (RAGEs). The AGE-RAGE interaction is linked to downstream diabetes side effects like atherosclerosis.

There's also research that indicates that cancer thrives in high-glucose environment, and that starving cancers of glucose reduces their size over time.

Wrong:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

The longevity people think that blood glucose levels are an important predictor for rate of (biological) aging. See e.g. https://www.lifespan.io/topic/blood-glucose-is-a-biomarker-o...

Well, they're not just people. They are longevity scientists.

longevity scientists are just people

I'm not the OP, but I had a CGM several times through Levels. I can tell you that the major spikes (glucose over 200 after sitting between 80-90) really made me feel like shit. The 2 times I can remember it getting that high were when I had too much sushi, and a huge bowl with white rice from Chipotle. Brown rice never seemed to spike me nearly as bad, especially if paired with something high in fiber like black/brown beans. From a long term health perspective, I have no idea if it's a problem or not. I didn't like how bigger spikes felt, so there's probably something to it being bad for you long term. Obviously the more often you spike as a "healthy" person, the less sensitive your body is to insulin. Staying even on my glucose levels is always where I felt the best.

straight rice and bread break down into sugars -very- quickly in the stomach, that's why mixing them with stuff like you mentioned (heavy in fat and/or protein) can really dampen the spikes in my own observations. Those are just anectdotal though and what works for me doesn't work for everyone. I do like to eat a salad first with some good fibrous veggies though OR something like eat some of a chicken/fish entrée or steak if I'm having that as part of a meal.

With Type 1 Diabetes, your pancreas is no longer producing insulin, with Type 2, it's typically that it's not producing enough insulin. My child is healthy, but his pancreas stopped producing insulin years ago. He lives with T1D.

My A1c is right on the edge of prediabetes, so I wasn't as concerned about the spikes as I was about my baseline, how long spikes last, etc.

> A lot of "keto" and "diabetic-friendly" products are terrible for most people's BG and were for mine.

Absolutely, there are a lot of companies trying to cash in on this new-ish market, and they'll do anything to their products to get the net carbs down to 0-2g "per serving" -- scare quotes around that because this is a particular annoyance of food labeling in the States: food labels declare the amount of various nutrients per "serving", but 1) they get to choose the serving size [0] and 2) they get to round numbers, so if they just pick the serving size such that it's 1.499g of carbs per serving, they get to put that it's "1g", and so on.

It makes it impossible to compare food labels between different items even among the same manufacturer (and even the same SKU but different/later packaging, because they don't have to issue a new SKU when they change the food label). If instead they were required to show amounts in g per kg (or ml per l for liquids, or whatever), they could be compared more easily.

[0] The FDA provides "Reference Amounts Customarily Consumed" and asks manufacturers to refer to them when deciding their serving sizes, but (from [1]):

> FDA's guidance documents, including this guidance, do not establish legally enforceable responsibilities. Instead, guidances describe our current thinking on a topic and should be viewed only as recommendations [...]

so really they can pick almost anything they like

> [...] unless specific regulatory or statutory requirements are cited.

unless the food is medicinal in some way, I guess?

[1] https://www.fda.gov/media/102587/download

Where do you put the needle thing? Does it get in the way of everyday things?

Typically it is on the back of the upper arm where it is covered by a short sleeve shirt. Generally it does not get in the way.

I also use a piece of kinesiology tape to make sure my CGM does not fall off.

The sensor typically goes on the back of your upper arm (your tricep). You can accidentally bump into things with it, but it was infrequent enough that it didn’t bother me.

The needle is only used in the application of the sensor. It’s spring-loaded and retracts after the sensor is attached. I hate needles, but I found that the tape on the sensor provided enough stimuli to overwhelm my brain and not really feel the needle when it went in.

No it never gets in the way. I would not recommend doing it unless you are a diabetic, the results are not that interesting. It took me two years to get used to smacking that needle into the upper arm/stomach/leg, spending up to 20 min -40 min getting over the fear was not a fun time.

I feel for anyone who has both diabetes and a fear of needles.

Having said that, it's no bug deal for 90% of people.

T1D here, needles are nothing compared to everything else an insulin dependent diabetic deals with. I guess only maybe 1 out of less than 100 shots hurt that much. It only happens when a nerve bundle is hit, then it smarts but it is still less bad than either high, or low blood sugar as well as how insane most every part of American 'health care' is. The main tricks for comfort are go with 29 gauge not the narrower more fragile types with the higher number gauges. The narrower ones have more fragile needle points and they can get damaged by bending during the insertion into the bottle. The other trick is to make sure the alcohol is dry before you take the shot.

The needle stick a flexible tube in a few mm, then the needle pulls out.

Think of it as a 5mm thick patch and ignore the tiny tube sucking your blood.

I keep mine on the front of my upper arm, where I automatically notice and protect it. The back of my arm usually means it's off in a few hours.

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