WazzuCoug
Member
WARNING: I'm sharing my experience taking part in a nutritional study. Do not partake in a study like this or conduct food experiments without consulting your doctor.
For those of you who saw my previous posts about this, I wrapped up the second and final week of the nutritional study I was taking part in. Like the first week, I wore a continuous glucose monitor 24/7 and weighed, photographed and tracked everything I ate. I have to say, I wish it wasn't over. I've talked with my doctor about getting an rx for a cgm so I can continue to do my own further food experiments.
In six weeks I'll have the reports on my microbiome and fat metabolism, as well as specific foods that my body will metabolize the best, and if I'm low on any good gut bacteria, there will be information about what foods to eat to improve those specific species. Finally, it will have a report on how well I metabolize fats and recommendations for what fats and carbs may trigger inflammation specific to my biology. I'm bummed that I have to wait that long!
Anyway, for those interested, here are a few graphs and a couple of experiments I did this week.
The longest experiment was centered around just two foods: a plain white bagel and 57g of cheddar cheese. On day 1 I had just the plain white bagel for breakfast after fasting overnight. On day 2, I ate just the cheese. On day 3, I ate the bagel with the cheese (like a bagel sandwich). On day 4, I ate only the bagel again, but I immediately went for a brisk walk afterward, and on day 6 I ate the cheese and then waited for 10 minutes and then ate the bagel. Below are the various glucose spokes for each day:
Day 1 Breakfast around 8am: glucose spike to about 165 on a single plain bagel
Day 2: Breakfast at 9am, and glucose flat line from cheese (as expected)
Day 3: breakfast around 7am; bagel with cheese, glucose spike about 20 lower than bagel alone
Day 4 breakfast around 6am, followed by 30 min brisk walk, one plain bagel, glucose spike about 12 lower than a bagel, and no exercise.
Day 5 breakfast around 6:30, cheese followed 10 min later by a bagel. About 35 lower than bagel alone and 10 lower than bagel and cheese at the same time.
Although the point of this experiment is not to try and say that you should eat white, refined grain bagels, it illustrates that eating protein/fat before simple or complex carbs will reduce their glycemic effect. Are you going to a party where there is cake? You might consider having something with good fat and/or protein a few minutes prior to the cake. Combining healthy fats with other low glycemic foods reduces their glycemic response even further. One of my staple foods of fried rice with either brown rice or quinoa hardly moved at all due to the combination of fats (avocado oil and eggs) and the complex carbs (rice, quinoa, other veggies).
If you eat a combination of foods that keep your blood sugar after eating from going above 140, that is very good. Generally, a non-diabetic person is usually between 70-90 after 8 hours of fasting, between 80-90 between meals, and between 100-140 after eating. You want to see your body process and return to normal fairly quickly, but not so fast that it causes a dip where your blood glucose drops below where it was before you ate.
There were other experiments such as pizza with different crusts (be sure to look at the ingredients of anything that says it's a cauliflower crust...turns out the one I chose was quite a bit worse than the regular pizza crust), different yogurts with different sweeteners and fruits, and other things like that. I wasn't always experimenting, sometimes I was just tracking what I normally would be eating as well.
There were other food experiments, but I won't bore you with more details here. I will be publishing a summary of all the experiments on my YouTube channel sometime this weekend if you are interested.
For those of you who saw my previous posts about this, I wrapped up the second and final week of the nutritional study I was taking part in. Like the first week, I wore a continuous glucose monitor 24/7 and weighed, photographed and tracked everything I ate. I have to say, I wish it wasn't over. I've talked with my doctor about getting an rx for a cgm so I can continue to do my own further food experiments.
In six weeks I'll have the reports on my microbiome and fat metabolism, as well as specific foods that my body will metabolize the best, and if I'm low on any good gut bacteria, there will be information about what foods to eat to improve those specific species. Finally, it will have a report on how well I metabolize fats and recommendations for what fats and carbs may trigger inflammation specific to my biology. I'm bummed that I have to wait that long!
Anyway, for those interested, here are a few graphs and a couple of experiments I did this week.
The longest experiment was centered around just two foods: a plain white bagel and 57g of cheddar cheese. On day 1 I had just the plain white bagel for breakfast after fasting overnight. On day 2, I ate just the cheese. On day 3, I ate the bagel with the cheese (like a bagel sandwich). On day 4, I ate only the bagel again, but I immediately went for a brisk walk afterward, and on day 6 I ate the cheese and then waited for 10 minutes and then ate the bagel. Below are the various glucose spokes for each day:
Day 1 Breakfast around 8am: glucose spike to about 165 on a single plain bagel
Day 2: Breakfast at 9am, and glucose flat line from cheese (as expected)
Day 3: breakfast around 7am; bagel with cheese, glucose spike about 20 lower than bagel alone
Day 4 breakfast around 6am, followed by 30 min brisk walk, one plain bagel, glucose spike about 12 lower than a bagel, and no exercise.
Day 5 breakfast around 6:30, cheese followed 10 min later by a bagel. About 35 lower than bagel alone and 10 lower than bagel and cheese at the same time.
Although the point of this experiment is not to try and say that you should eat white, refined grain bagels, it illustrates that eating protein/fat before simple or complex carbs will reduce their glycemic effect. Are you going to a party where there is cake? You might consider having something with good fat and/or protein a few minutes prior to the cake. Combining healthy fats with other low glycemic foods reduces their glycemic response even further. One of my staple foods of fried rice with either brown rice or quinoa hardly moved at all due to the combination of fats (avocado oil and eggs) and the complex carbs (rice, quinoa, other veggies).
If you eat a combination of foods that keep your blood sugar after eating from going above 140, that is very good. Generally, a non-diabetic person is usually between 70-90 after 8 hours of fasting, between 80-90 between meals, and between 100-140 after eating. You want to see your body process and return to normal fairly quickly, but not so fast that it causes a dip where your blood glucose drops below where it was before you ate.
There were other experiments such as pizza with different crusts (be sure to look at the ingredients of anything that says it's a cauliflower crust...turns out the one I chose was quite a bit worse than the regular pizza crust), different yogurts with different sweeteners and fruits, and other things like that. I wasn't always experimenting, sometimes I was just tracking what I normally would be eating as well.
There were other food experiments, but I won't bore you with more details here. I will be publishing a summary of all the experiments on my YouTube channel sometime this weekend if you are interested.
