Study reveals blood sugar control is a key factor in slowing brain aging
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I quite liked the Freestyle Libre 3, which you can buy online without a prescription. The software is rudimentary but it'll give you the information that you need. A single device will last for (up to) 2 weeks, which is better than the alternatives I looked at, hence my recommendation.
IIRC from Peter Attia's book Outlive, you are aiming to keep blood glucose at an average of 100, with very few spikes above X (I think he said 160, but would need to check). He does suggest once you have measured for a few days to push the envelope with carbs, sugars, etc and see how your body reacts.
You could go with the Dexcom G7 instead, which I've read favorable things about.
millions of people do it every few weeks. (yes, that doesn't mean it's absolutely zero risk, of course.)
Those do not require a prescription, but they are also not a CGM. They are blood sugar test kits, you can order them on Amazon. You could poke your fingers every hour or 15min to replicate the continuous sampling of a CGM, but that's tedious and makes your fingers sore...
CGMs (in the US) just recently (this year) are allowed to be sold OTC without a prescription, now you can buy them online too.
They are accurate enough - they are FDA approved (in the US).
https://www.nutrisense.io/what-is-a-cgm/how-to (see the stop-motion video showing the application)
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""" The sensor is a tiny piece of material that measures real-time glucose levels in your interstitial fluid. You’ll insert the sensor under your skin with an applicator. It uses a needle to pierce your skin. You remove the needle, and it leaves the sensor in place.
"""
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/continuous-gl...
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this is the one mentioned, you can see the small filament/needle on the animation
https://www.freestyle.abbott/us-en/compare-cgms.html
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and R&D is - of course - ongoing to have a completely non-invasive solution
https://spectrum.ieee.org/skinlike-biosensor-offers-needlefr...
When asked why, she said, "When we give animals fruits that humans eat, they all develop diabetes."
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/07/655345630/how-fruit-became-so...
An older pop science take "That Sugar Film" [1] also provides some interesting perspectives, and a more day-in-the-life practical example of what we're putting into our bodies.
Several years on and I'm still struggling to take a lot of these messages to heart, even though I know so much of what I eat is bad for me and hurting my metabolism.
See eg his wildly debunked claims on hubermans podcast.
https://web.archive.org/web/20241105075317/https://www.bgu.a...
For example carbs include fiber, which can stabilize blood sugar. fat can also help.
I listened to the audiobook for "the glucose revolution" and it was pretty educational. glucose spikes are what you want to prevent.
Your body adjusts its insulin production to match the food you're digesting. Diabetics need to calibrate this manually, which is error prone as there's more variables than just what you ate (stress, sleep, hormone cycles, prior meals...).
The problematic aspect of foods with large amounts of easily digested carbohydrates is that the immediate demands for insulin are higher which might pose a problem in diabetics (unless they are treating hypoglycemia, in which its desired).
Your blood sugar won't stay high if you are healthy, but there is certainly sugar digested from the rice entering the bloodstream.
Sushi rice causes me (type-1) to spike. Other kinds of rice (jasmine, pilaf, etc) behave more like normal carbohydrates.
[0] https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/99211/perfect-sushi-rice/
I'm speaking only to carb content; the discussion of whether it's healthy on a holistic basic is a much larger conversation.
and of course as industrialization, relative food abundance, and sugar sweetened drinks proliferated all over the world obesity did (and does) too
Means the body always has some available.
Or, in other words, it does not get a chance to burn fat.
And eventually the mechanism itself degrades, becoming unable to burn fat.
Keep in mind that our always-available food supply situation is very recent in our species history.
Intermittent fasting is what the human body has evolved to do, and how we can get our health back.
I’ve been thinking about it the whole day and your reply made me wonder about getting in the business of sugar
If you don’t eat meat then your sugar and carbs probably are processed from a vegetable in the first place.
Be an adult and eat your fruits and veggies.
A pretty easy solution would be to mix vanilla whey protein into a fruit smoothie to boost your protein.
Another would be to just abstain from sugar for a few weeks before slowly reintroducing foods. [0]
eating chips (fat/oil, salts, carbs) is also better than sugary stuff, it's just very easy to overeat by snacking (and then usually people still go and have full meals)
Still nowadays. Docs still learn about LDL and HDL like it says something about your future cardiovascular risks and tell you to control your diet to avoid fat. The original study on this is full of flaws.
Docs are _basically_ taught to just put everyone on Statins. On as high a dose as people will tolerate. There's fairly good evidence that statins work, the problem is more than people don't like taking them.
I could quit at any time, I just don't want to.
It's not only people who drink lots of soda and eat candy, sweets, and desserts...it's also people who have a carb-heavy diet with lots of bread, pasta, tortillas, chips, etc.
The advantage of those foods over sugar is they usually come with fiber, which buffers their absorption and reduces the blood sugar spikes & insulin response.
I can eat a bagel with cream cheese and see a massive blood sugar spike in my CGM, it's definitely something to be avoided or moderated.
Fructose itself isn't unhealthy. It also isn't unhealthy if there is a little in most things you eat - assuming you are eating healthy amounts of fruits and vegetables, you'll wind up eating fructose. Like a lot of things, overconsumption is bad and adding sugars to everything isn't the best thing.
Even when I was super fit, and literally with 4% body fat, it was still something I should not have been doing
Studies that use proprietary plants are always suspicious to me.
https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2023/01/02/bmjnph-20...
"What predicts drug-free type 2 diabetes remission? Insights from an 8-year general practice service evaluation of a lower carbohydrate diet with weight loss "
"Methods Advice on a lower carbohydrate diet and weight loss was offered routinely to people with T2D between 2013 and 2021, in a suburban practice with 9800 patients. (...)"
"Results (...) Remission of diabetes was achieved in 77% with T2D duration less than 1 year, falling to 20% for duration greater than 15 years. Overall, remission was achieved in 51% of the cohort. (...)"
Note: most read paper in BMJ history according to https://bmj.altmetric.com/details/140757393
The Mediterranean diet is still backed up by dietary science, which has actively tried out various interventions and compared results. This paper apparently being one of them.
The inverse could also be true! Removing sugars (and most carbs tbh) from my diet noticeably stabilizes my energy levels throughout the day, which helps think clearly and reduces downtime. I do this periodically, and the difference is immediate and stark.
I’m far more productive too no sugar crash.
what to eat?
When healthy people eat sugar, insulin is secreted and the blood sugar goes right back down. Overweight and obese people with time develop type-2 diabetes so they produce less insulin and due to excess fat around cells, their muscles don't respond as well to insulin anymore and can't take up glucose from the blood. That causes spikes in blood sugar and elevated levels throughout the day.
The answer to blood sugar control is being lean, and you can get lean by eating less fat. The clue is in the name, really.
After that, intermittent fasting or OMAD are excellent at keeping blood sugar under check.
After over two years, never been better. Feel better than in my 20s, while in my 40s.
e.g. consider you could elect to not eat carbs at all in your one meal.
And metabolism doesn't work like that in the first place. Even if you actually spiked your glucose by eating something silly such as sugar, it would go quickly up then quickly down, unless you're severely insulin resistant.
Restricting carbs severely without the intention of entering ketosis is very not fun for most people, I find. It’s keto flu without any of the benefits.
Intermittent fasting is about letting the body be like this, as it naturally would. That's why meals are time-boxed to a small window within the day: To let it fast during the rest of the day.
The more frequently a person eats, the less likely his body is to enter ketosis. Until it becomes unable to; it just gets hungry every few hours instead, where the person just feeds and perpetuates the cycle of not entering ketosis.
It is no lie that humans were hunters/gatherers until very recent history.
>doesn't explain...
How do you explain the fact I only eat once a day, and I am fine in that regard?
Note that my meal usually includes rice (aka carbs).
Now I have good BMI, not overweight at all, and good energy levels through the day.
I do not get hungry, and eating once saves me a lot of time and effort I can direct towards more interesting endeavors.
Edited parent from "and OMAD" to "or OMAD", because either method works.
Ultimately OMAD is just the form of intermittent fasting that seems to work best for me.
> Maintaining low blood sugar levels, even within the normal range, shows promise for preserving a younger brain, especially when combined with a healthy diet and regular physical activity.
sugar -- refined sugar (crystaly power, or syrup)
sugar -- as part of a fruit/cane/beet
The first is much more dangerous than the latter. The latter in many cases --when eaten with the fruit that it was produced in -- is very healthy!
A diet of only water is deadly != water is not healthy.
He was a "fruitarian" and thought his diet would cure his pancreatic cancer! Which is what caused it. His Reality Distortion Field killed him.
How do you know what causes cancer? Isn't that hard (and nearly always a matter of chances) with cancer?
Do fruitarians die from pancreatic cancer more than the rest of the population? (no)
Do you have anything to back up your claim? (seems now)
Yes I'm serious.
Meanwhile, over on r/ketoscience, we're seeing tonnes of evidence in the health benefits and major milestones in cancer treatment (among other diseases). But few are talking about it.
Then there's this gem. There is a valid GoogleDrive link without paywall. I've simply reproduced the post's title:
Incredible new science paper from Miki Ben-Dor, Ran Barkai, and Raphael Sirtoli has 25 scientific points for why humans are truly carnivores. "The evolution of the human trophic level during the Pleistocene" - Got the full text paper too - 30 pages long! https://www.reddit.com/r/zerocarb/comments/lz9wj8/incredible...
(Did you notice the Zero Carb subreddit? Wink wink nudge nudge)
I think the suppliers of these peripherals are way to good at sales pitch to be trusted.
I did check the prices before, it's about $100 a month (although I'm not in the US, maybe it's more there?). But you don't need to do it forever. A couple of weeks is probably enough to learn which foods to avoid.
$100 on preventing yourself from getting diabetes later in life is a steal, and for many people seeing the proof that yes, chocolate cake really does spike your blood sugar to dangerous levels, might be the final push to make real lifestyle changes.
> potentially flaky
Why do you think that? All the ones I've seen are advertised as FDA approved devices.
I expect that in another few years smartwatches will be able to mention it and suddenly it won't seem weird at all, everyone with a watch will be doing it.
What data? Presumably this is all private in each person's device. You make it sound like they also fixed compliance and privacy of collecting and analyzing all the data, which is a big deal.
A constant glucose monitor & diet app & membership which is also a "clinical trial".