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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

Before I got cancer, I had one through Levels, and it was informative. Dessert is much worse than I'd thought. Rice, too, including brown rice. I remember eating some biryani and a small bit of naan at an Indian restaurant and thinking that I'd been pretty healthy, only to see a spike of like 80.

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I saw an interview a while back between Tim Ferriss and someone who had tried CGM for fun/research. One thing he noticed was the huge impact a short walk after a meal brought down his blood sugar levels. Tim then mentioned he experienced the same thing and that there is a saying in China, something to the effect of, "take 100 steps after a meal, live 99 years." This also linked up with something I had looked up a few years ago when I noticed that I always saw families of Indian decent walking around neighborhoods, but never anyone else. I looked it up, and founds there is a word in Marathi of taking 100 steps after a meal. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatapawali)

It seems there has been this age old knowledge that taking a short walk after a meal is really good for you, which somehow got lost in some/many cultures. My parents would always say they had to sit after a meal to let their food digest... it never really made sense to me. My grandma, on the other hand, is 103 and gets pretty upset if people try to stop her from walking after a meal (or whenever she wants). We always just thought she liked walking, but maybe there is something else driving her, it seems to have worked out for her. It was very interesting to hear the CGM back up some of these practices that have likely been going on for hundreds or thousands of years.

I have been wanting to try one. This approval opens up the door. I think seeing something like this with my own eyes, with my own body, with actual numbers, would have a bunch bigger impact than some anecdotal stories from others and nice sayings which align.

It looks like there is some research being done in the area as well.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-022-01649-4

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8912639/

That's fascinating -- you know how your body sometimes manifests a craving for a food when it "knows" that you're deficient in some nutrient that food will provide?

I get the same feeling (of my body directing me to take some action) but it's not after meals, for me it's after having more than one beer. After 2-3 beers I want to go walk around the neighborhood for half an hour (and it's a bummer when the neighborhood is not pedestrian-friendly).

Taking 100 steps after a meal is a common saying in India as well. The saying also advises sleep on ones left side for good health. Goes like this in Kannada - "Undu nooradi nadedu, edamaggulagi malagidare vaidyana bhandatavilla sarvajna"

Literally "if you walk a hundred steps after eating and sleep on you left, there won't be any doctor's shenanigans"

sleeping on your left side can help with gastrointestinal issues somewhat (like reflux) or after eating an acidic dinner.

My grandmother had (among _many_ others) an aphorism along those lines: "after dinner rest a while, after supper walk a mile". I have no idea where it came from, and was/am unwilling to leave the house and walk a mile in the cold when I'd just eaten and wanted a nap, but perhaps this is A Thing in a few places.

Momentary high blood sugar is perfectly fine after eating carbohydrate-rich meals.

This was down voted, but it's all about the time scale. A major pathway of transporting energy from your food to your cells is via glucose in your blood and your cells then use or store it for later. Insulin production reduces the spike, but that response isn't instantaneous.

So on a second by second basis numbers that would be concerning across an hour are fine. Similarly your average over an hour post meal can be much higher than a healthy average across a day.

Yup. A1C, which is the main diagnostic measure, due to the way it’s measured is a roughly 90 day moving average with somewhat of a recency bias.

Like most things, it’s mostly about area under the curve, as long as the extremes aren’t too much so.

for sure, the length of the spike is just as important, it's like energy and it's an area under the curve type of phenomena

Desserts can definitely send your levels quite high but I don't think I'd qualify some biryani and naan with a reading of 80 as unhealthy. You probably ate a healthy portion and left it at that. Is 80 not well within the normal range?

He probably means it spiked 80 from where it was (e.g. 100 to 180)

Which is still pretty normal, low for a full meal if anything, if not presiding with insulin.

Is 80 high? That seems totally fine.

80, as an absolute reading, is on the low side of normal. Like, that’s what it might be first thing in the morning before you eat. Anything sub 50 starts to get dicey.

Eat fiber first. Add more protein. Eat reheated rice (resistant starches). Isn't it interesting how much these little details matter?

healthy proteins and fats are good for you, both will slow down digestion time. I rarely eat only rice as the main course of a meal, and usually eat something either with it or before it, and it's almost always brown rice.

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