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.
To be fair I have cut down my daily 250ml intake down to a once a week thing. After a particularly nice and heavy meal I like to have one like someone might have a beer.
Blood sugar monitoring is the latest craze in the dieting scene in Asia. You can not buy the little monitors online and people are doing it because they believe that a blood sugar spike is what is tied to obesity.
Being able to know your blood sugar in reaction to the things you eat in realtime is simply incredible. Diabetes starts years or even decades before people have bad enough symptoms to get a diagnosis. If you are aware of which foods cause blood sugar spikes and learn to avoid them, you're doing something amazing for your future self. Of course, you don't necessarily need a device to know that it's going to be mostly high GI sugary foods that do that, but it does seem like this is more of a personal thing than people used to think, and the data from thousands of people without diagnosed diabetes will be highly useful. And who knows, there might be some surprises for you in there.
> and the data from thousands of people without diagnosed diabetes will be highly useful
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.
That company has existed for a few years and the challenges I mentioned are exactly the challenges they are trying to solve. Sharing medical data is a hard space.
Blood sugar monitoring with CGM is extremly expensive and potentially flaky. When you use it to monitor your blood sugar for medical reasons you still need to do professional controls. Diabetes Type-1 is an autoimmune disease it kills beta cells in the pancreas. They are slowly or quickly killed in the span of weeks or sometimes a couple of years. AFAIK once it has started it is impossible to stop at the moment. With type-2 I have no knowledge of a way to do a diagnosis decades before you get it, considering how different diabetes is between people I am sure you can catch some people. I have a hard time believing that CGM data will be usefull without deep context.
I think the suppliers of these peripherals are way to good at sales pitch to be trusted.
> Blood sugar monitoring with CGM is extremly expensive
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.
I wonder how related it is to claim[0] that mental disorders are caused by metabolic disorders of the brain. Does it mean that sugar is like oxygen to fire and your brain just "burns" faster?
I think such analogies are useful and have their place, but I’d be super cautious about taking it anywhere near that far. Reducing something as complex as mental health to a redox reaction is definitely more than a bit…reductive.
Really, "oxygen to fire" is a bad metaphor for sugar for anybody remotely aquinted with chemistry. Why not "gas to fire" or "hay to fire" or even.. "sugar to fire", instead?
I'm a big fan of intermittent fasting, but OMAD doesn't work for me. I find it difficult to get all the necessary calories and nutrients in a single sitting and not feel completely bloated afterward. Especially if there has been an intense workout on the same day or the day before (me hungry!)
I was a 2MAD (18:6) before, and it worked well but I was trying to lose weight, and hit some sort of barrier. After almost a year of that, I switched to OMAD, broke through it, and it's been over a year now.
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.
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.
Being constantly on the edge of keto but not actually in ketosis means, for most people, low energy, headaches, and irritability.
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.
A body that's working properly is in ketosis most of the time, and enters this mode, its normal mode, very easily.
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.
The naturalistic fallacy doesn’t explain away the simple fact that when I haven’t eaten for 12 hours I’m slow and stupid and hangry. You can invoke “working properly” and “naturally” but I think my body is working properly when I can code, and isn’t when I can’t, and unless I’m keto-adapted (48-72h since carbs) I can’t without blood sugar.
The same, what I found working for me is breakfast as soon as I feel hungry (~8AM) and then main meal around ~4PM, and not much in between. I couldn't do OMAD or IF waiting till 10AM or 12 even, I got very sleepy afterwards, which my intuition tells me wasn't much healthy. So I think everybody needs to listen to own body and adjust these.
100g of carbs a day is easily burnt. That's about 4 breads, or 300g of cooked pasta, rice. Eating OMAD, that's enough for a satisfying meal (with lots of protein). That's been my main diet for the past 3/4 years and I have a very easy time keeping lean mass and lowering my bodyfat %.
Yes. I'm diabetic and eating a relatively meal with rice in it (think sushi) absolutely spikes my blood sugar (it's not uncommon for filling sushi meal to have as many carbs as 4 or 5 candy bars)
I'm speaking only to carb content; the discussion of whether it's healthy on a holistic basic is a much larger conversation.
Depending on the type of white rice, yes. However eating rice with high fat/protein foods can reduce the sharpness of the spike. And rice is rarely eaten alone.
In an otherwise healthy adult, no. In diabetics, maybe.
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).
I wonder: if you eat carbs or suger in smaller portions but more often throughout the day, can you "flatten the curve" this way and reduce the spikes. Is this good for you?
Nope, it is impossible to flatten the curve of insulin spike and that is actually quite damaging, you will be releasing insulin the whole day, the hormone that signals energy storing mode which also makes it more difficult to burn it
I asked Claude what's going on, and she said that the main difference lies in the fact that low-GI food naturally contains fiber and other stuff that slow digestion, and that merely spreading out the consumption of high-GI food cannot replicate the same effect.
It would be eating smaller portions and less throughout the day. It'll spike anytime you have a meal, however, any five minute activity that cause sweat will significantly drop your blood glucose levels. Eating fiber, then protein, followed by carbs will flatten and slow down the curve.
It's also so very difficult to avoid. I opened yesterday a can of tuna and beans salad - it tasted almost like dessert. Are the producers really crazy? Or are they onto something? Sweet bread for sandwiches, sweet bbq on grilled meat, jam with cheese, so much of the (modern?) cuisine is just disgusting to me. Note, desserts are fine and good, I'd love a tiramisu right now. But sweet corn soup??? Ew.
The point of preservatives is to prevent biotic life from consuming it. If the food is actively preserved--sugared or salted or what have you--it will be just as cytotoxic if not prepared in a way to dilute or remove the preservative.
One of my least favorite games to play these days is trying to find ham that doesn't have glucose or its relatives added to it. My understanding is that it's added simply because it makes the product more addictive, gives bigger spikes of energy which many people enjoy, but it's the polar opposite of what I'm trying to find.
Speaking of that energy spike, is it something you would get from sweetened ham? Does it have that much sugar oh my... Isn't the spike rather coming from a piece of cake, which happens also to be the proper way to consume sugars? That or fruit, also good.
True! As a real addicted to sugar (but under control), I prefer to eat a lot of sugar intentionally, a proper dessert. Nothing is more waste of biological clocks than added sugar.
This was an interesting film that talked about how fat was demonised in the 1960s(?) so food companies started taking it out as much as possible but replacing it with sugar to retain taste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Sugar_Film It certainly matches your experience.
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.
Yes and no, docs are taught that LDL and HDL are not the targets themselves, it's possible to move those numbers without actually improving outcomes at all (especially improving HDL doesn't seem to really do anything).
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.
Retain taste? Fat doesn't taste sweet, at least not to me... the only reason I can imagine is they do it to mask a bad taste, or just to hide that the ingredients are bland (and/or low quality). That, I can understand - although still not approve as it's even worse, lying under the guise of sweetness.
Yeah, "retain" was the wrong word - what I meant was that it replaced one thing that tastes nice with something else that tastes nice. But like GP I find almost every processed food too sweet these days.
Because as stated, it's not true. As with most things in diets, it's about what amounts you eat, not so much what you eat. In other words, this is a good example of how oversimplifying your argument makes it weaker. Similarly, lactose is a sugar, yet it has numerous health benefits, especially in young kids. I think a better wording of what you mean would be to say that consuming too much sugar is bad for your health, because that is both more accurate and has less holes you can poke in it.
Well, you say that as a rebuttal, but that's literally true. Alcohol is a known carcinogen, it causes cancer in humans without a shadow of a doubt and there is no disagreement on this matter. Medical professionals and government agencies worldwide agree on this fact. But we still drink alcohol, whether for the taste, to unwind, or for other reasons, because we accept that so long as it's not excessive, it's not too bad.
It is also in honey, maple syrup, agave nectar, some fruits, and some vegetables. In otherwords, it is pretty available in healthy foods.
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.
Fructose is unhealthy literally the same way as alcohol. It’s the only carb that needs to be processed in the liver because it’s toxic and the excess is converted to visceral fat which is damaging and causes nonalcoholic fatty liver
For me, I'm not overweight at all (quite the opposite, actually), but I'm totally addicted to sugar. To the point that food other than carbs/sugar is really uninteresting to me. Doesn't help that I don't like meat. What else can I eat? I can't survive on just vegetables
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)
I think is not about accepting that fact. They probably know this. It's all about palatability. Once you taste something sweet and like it, you remember that and come back to it. An icecream, a soda, a croissant, chocolate, cookie, donuts. You name it. Is simple as that. You barely think about that the soda you drink is bad a thing, you like it and you drink it. Some people do think about this though and refrain from making sugary food a habit and I think that's the key. Making any of those sweet things an exception and not a rule.
I've seen this discourse all over the internet and IRL. People are simply not honest with themselves. Take for example that the US government essentially cuts a check every year to the tune of billions to soda companies via EBT/food stamp programs. Whenever this comes up, "let poor people enjoy things" is the general consensus. They have such poor quality of life that a little soda here and there is an enjoyment that we cannot take away. Imagine if we allowed people to buy cigs or booze on government assistance. I use to have libertarian views on fast food and junk food but at this point, we should ban it all, esp if we are providing reduced/free healthcare to a population where we fund food/grocery purchases.
Flip side of this is the very high cost of true organic and pesticide-minimal/free foods. And yeah, not being honest is somewhat commonplace, regrettably. I for one don't always like wiping off the mirror for a better look.
Blood sugar is not affected by only "sugar" (sucrose). All carbohydrates are converted into sugars by your body, thus potatoes, grains (rice, bread, pasta, etc), fruit (and juice) also cause your blood sugar to spike.
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.
There is a very interesting book on sugar. Pure, white and deadly by John Yudkin. Is backed by research. Also of interest it might be this talk by Robert Lustig: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kOCPyheVesM
Big +1 to Robert Lustig - I haven't read his books, but his conference talks are excellent. It looks like one of the older ones might have been taken lost to the Internet Gods, but the linked one is great, and there are plenty of others.
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.
I took a guided tour of the London Zoo this summer. The zoologist said that they had to procure vegetables from special sources and that they couldn't give fruits to the animals at the zoo.
When asked why, she said, "When we give animals fruits that humans eat, they all develop diabetes."
Readers beware: Peter Lustig is infamous for making up conclusions and citing papers that do not support his claims.
Would steer clear of everything that involves his name.
See eg his wildly debunked claims on hubermans podcast.
Somewhat tangential to the article, but I've long been a supporter of gradually introducing a tax on added sugar or sugar in general (with appropriate taxing on other sweeteners as well), and make it really hurt for added sugars for meals or other ingredients. Our palettes have become so sweet because everything we eat has sugar in it, and it's really hard to avoid.
You can be in deny, that's not my problem. All the facts are open there for you to interpret, if you think the cancer in his digestive tract wasn't because of his life-long diet, that's a problem for you. I hope you don't go to the same lengths as him to try to prove you are right (and find out too late that you are wrong).
Even if we assume that you are correct by claiming that fruitarian diet was that killed Steve Jobs, you cannot extrapolate that fruits are unhealthy from the fact that diet of only fruits is harmful.
A diet of only water is deadly != water is not healthy.
"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. (...)"
It's the weight loss that leads to "remission" (experts outside of companies promoting low-carb interventions would argue about the use of this term here).
In the study they use Mankai Duckweed, which is a proprietary strand of Duckweed that is no longer sold to consumers as of 2022 or so. The corporate website still has an intake form for distributors and restaurants/businesses.
Studies that use proprietary plants are always suspicious to me.
No, that was just the part where a lot of supposed "blue zones" (regions where average lifespan is significantly higher than average) happened to be islands in the Mediterranean. A lot of which was indeed due to pension fraud rather than above-average age, which is easier on those remote islands.
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.
It's absolutely worth the experiment of getting a continuous glucose monitor for a couple of weeks to see where your lifestyle is at.
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.
"""
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.
They do require blood samples. The device sticks to the back of your arm, and a small sensor is embedded in your skin. It's painless, and the sensor continuously samples the blood in your skin to measure blood sugar levels.
They are accurate enough - they are FDA approved (in the US).
it's a brand new short sterile needle used for the application, then a flexible filament is left in, immediately covered with a protective patch (adhesive bandage/membrane/layer).
millions of people do it every few weeks. (yes, that doesn't mean it's absolutely zero risk, of course.)
welcome! if you invest time and money it probably makes sense to allocate ~10 days where you can avoid intense sweating, as that can make the thing come off.
It's bizarrely painless to both insert and remove (it comes with an applicator, and can be removed just by firmly pulling on it). You carefully clean the site with alcohol before attaching it. I bought some 3m transparent film (Tegaderm) to protect it while I was wearing it, and changed the film twice during the two week period.
Stelo (https://www.stelo.com/) and Lingo (https://www.hellolingo.com/) are the two non prescription ones. It's definitely worth it to try 2 weeks and see how different foods/environments spike you.
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.
I had a hard time reading Attia's book because something seemed so extreme and vigilant about his approach. The last chapter really blew that all open in the dramatic portrayal of how psychologically unhealthy many aspects of his life are, for seemingly tragic reasons. For me, the trauma driving his perfectionism brought into question the ethos of his whole approach, regardless of how sound or not the science may be.
I had to scroll down pretty far to find out what "good blood sugar control" means:
> 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.
People in this thread are conflating sugar consumption and blood sugar levels.
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.
It boggles my mind how long it's taken for mainstream science to consider keto and carnivore diets. Everywhere, we're seeing that it's blood sugar that is the key factor in health.
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)
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadhttps://web.archive.org/web/20241105075317/https://www.bgu.a...
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMHfBobgLSI
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".
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.
[0] https://brainenergy.com/
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.
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.
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).
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.
I'm speaking only to carb content; the discussion of whether it's healthy on a holistic basic is a much larger conversation.
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).
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/
Your blood sugar won't stay high if you are healthy, but there is certainly sugar digested from the rice entering the bloodstream.
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 could quit at any time, I just don't want to.
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.
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.
If you don’t eat meat then your sugar and carbs probably are processed from a vegetable in the first place.
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)
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]
[0] https://philmaffetone.com/method/nutrition/
I’ve been thinking about it the whole day and your reply made me wonder about getting in the business of sugar
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.
Even when I was super fit, and literally with 4% body fat, it was still something I should not have been doing
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.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3892434/
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...
See eg his wildly debunked claims on hubermans podcast.
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!
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.
A diet of only water is deadly != water is not healthy.
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
Studies that use proprietary plants are always suspicious to me.
what to eat?
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.
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.
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...
They are accurate enough - they are FDA approved (in the US).
You could go with the Dexcom G7 instead, which I've read favorable things about.
https://www.totaldiabetessupply.com/products/dexcom-g7
millions of people do it every few weeks. (yes, that doesn't mean it's absolutely zero risk, of course.)
https://www.nutrisense.io/what-is-a-cgm/how-to
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.
> 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.
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.
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)