Part 9: Wearing a Continuous Glucose Monitor as a non-diabetic Physician: An unrequested oral glucose tolerance test

The chart above is not the PQRS of an EKG, it’s a blood glucose spike, followed with a brief hypoglycemic episode.

Both events were asymptomatic – I had no idea they happened until I checked continuous glucose monitor readings later.

What must have happened is the diet soda I ordered at our favorite beer garden was delivered as a sugar sweetened version.

I could just imagine the insulin spike that must have been created this one time, and yet, for most Americans, this is happening every day, multiple times a day, and they don’t know it. Experiments with Continuous Glucose Monitors show it:

And national numbers do as well, the fasting blood glucose level of Americans has been rising:

As has our weight. The two are probably related.

As I mentioned in part 7 of this series, for a person without known diabetes/prediabetes who is fat adapted (via a low-carbohydrate, healthy fat, or #LCHF diet), the response to a carbohydrate load may be different than a person who is carbohydrate adapted or continually seeing a massive deluge of carbohydrates and/or processed foods.

In a person who is not diabetic and specifically not type 1 diabetic and therefore produces insulin, this is not as dangerous as it would be for someone who does not produce insulin.

As has been shown by @DikemanDave – keeping carbohydrate intake managed overall gives a better result.

Success in avoiding diabetic complications has a very large part to do with identification, admission and subsequent removal of the glucose foods – grain, starch, sugar and froot – as they are the most potent culprit in rollercoaster, elevated blood glucose. pic.twitter.com/UQT5j4jnX9

— RD (@DikemanDave) May 5, 2019

For me, a resumption back to my #LCHF eating pattern showed a similarly flat curve.

And maybe the desire to order water from now on in restaurants 🙂 .

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Never skipping in New York, followed by #nutrientdense is better than #energydense meal 👍 (& still #bodyhairpositive) Blood glucose rise is physiologic with exercise, no increase with the meal (glycemic index = 0) #ShotOniPhone #fitnessmotivation #fitfam #instafit #fitness #gayfitness @BarrysBootCamp #NeverSkipToday #Ketosis #KetoAF #Yes2Meat #PlantBased & #PlantFree #KetogenicDiet #DataOverDogma #Optimism #Science #fatadapted #NYC #instaNYC #instafit #CGM #diabetesprevention #fitnessmotivation #Pride2019 #LGBTQ 🇺🇸💪🏳️‍🌈❤️🥦🥩🕊🇮🇱

A post shared by Ted Eytan, MD, MS, MPH (@tedeytan) on May 15, 2019 at 6:39am PDT

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