9 ms·

I recently had an unusual health event that resulted in me passing out. My wife, who is a physician, thought it might be hypoglycemia, since i'm at high risk fo

I recently had an unusual health event that resulted in me passing out. My wife, who is a physician, thought it might be hypoglycemia, since i'm at high risk for diabetes. She found a super friendly endocrinologist who put me on a CGM for two weeks. I never hit the hypoglycemia range during those two weeks, so it didn't really explain what my issue... but honestly the data was SUPER interesting. Just observing the various spikes made me make healthier choices, or noticing when I was feeling extra tired and seeing if that correlated to not having eaten for little while, or eating something sugary before. It's sort of like tracking your steps when you first get a smart watch. It may not have been the reason you got the device, but seeing the data, people are encouraged to act on it, even if you don't have an acute issue. since I didn't have a prescription, I couldn't get one here (didn't want to go through some sketch online site). I tried to get one from my family in India, but the prices were really high and they couldn't get the fancier one that tracks straight to your phone, so I didn't get one. I think this could be a god send for preventing pre-diabetic people who would take preventative steps if it weren't such a pain in the ass to measure consistently.

oldgradstudent 3y ago
> My wife, who is a physician, thought it might be hypoglycemia, since i'm at high risk for diabetes. Isn't hypoglycemia a side effect of insulin and other glucose lowing agent rather than of the diabetes itself?
lr4444lr 3y ago
What kinds of food intake/non-intake habits aside from the obvious culprits surprised you?
- rodly 3y ago
  Long-term they will likely make no changes because human desire, habits and behaviors are rarely unknown to us. The parent comment mentioned feeling tired after consuming something with a lot of sugar, was that really a mystery prior to using CGM? I doubt it. Sure it's interesting to correlate to your perceived wellness (or lack thereof) with a wearable spitting out data but after the novelty of this discovery wears off my guess is that people will simply stop caring to check what they already know to be the case.
  - sxg 3y ago
    > The parent comment mentioned feeling tired after consuming something with a lot of sugar, was that really a mystery prior to using CGM? I doubt it. They may not have known just how sugary that item was since most people don't bother to calculate the sugar content of everything they consume, but the CGM puts a number on it. That experience could be enough to change the OPs behavior. I agree that most people may not care to make behavioral changes in response to more data, but there are definitely other people who will.
  - o_____________o 3y ago
    It's more than intake. It's food order, stress, sleep, context, and so on. Did you eat enough fiber, did you add more fat this time, did you drink the night before? Did you walk afterwards? Unless your life is extremely regimented and uniform, they provide a ton of data.
  - dleink 3y ago
    > Long-term they will likely make no changes because human desire, habits and behaviors are rarely unknown to us. It seems like this thinking leads to desires, habits and behaviors remaining a mystery to us.
  - dog_boxer72 3y ago
    Is it really such a stretch to imagine that maybe some people really don’t correlate those things? People aren’t research papers, we have multiple cognitive distortions working all the time obfusticating the truth, but tech like this can help bypass them
  - jxramos 3y ago
    there is something powerful about the objective outside-of-self confirmation of something because it eliminates the doubt that can be casted as it all being in ones head. External confirmation is enlightening and motivating.
  - jeremiahbuckley 3y ago
    My view: I’m busy, I have a lot of things I’m trying to figure out. For example, All of my free time should be spent getting better at AI programming. Seemingly infinite horizon. I could carefully track a half dozen signals to correlate consumption to effect, but if the effect is “I’m tired and don’t have much willpower”, that’s hard to remember to track. I just haven’t built up that habit; heck I’m having a hard time keeping up the habit of light exercise. I have a cousin who was diagnosed with some stage of diabetes; got a continuous blood sugar monitor; ended up losing a ton of weight. I’m definitely in the market for this—something to make it easier for me. It’s undoubtedly healthier for me than mainlining wygovey, which is another option on the table.
temp_praneshp 3y ago
The ones on diabetic warehouse don't work well enough (https://www.diabeticwarehouse.org/collections/continuous-glucose-monitoring https://www.diabeticwarehouse.org/collections/continuous-glu...? Or is that site sketch for you? I think you can just get one if you are willing to burn $500 (not cheap, but only in the price range of a higher-end smartwatch)
- vlabakje90 3y ago
  Keep in mind that a single sensor will work for only a week or two, depending on the type. So it's not exactly right to compare the price to a smartwatch.
  - temp_praneshp 3y ago
    Ah okay, thanks for telling me that; I thought you keep recharging the battery every week from the description.
    - pwthornton 3y ago
      No. They are single-use, and it embeds into your skin with a probe.
cheriot 3y ago
Thanks for confirming. Normal feedback on health habits is delayed by months/years and hard to trace back to specific actions so your story makes a lot of sense. I might have to get over my dislike of needles :|
- mikenew 3y ago
  It's more akin to a finger prick than a needle. Might still be a bit psychologically challenging but I've done it and it's really not bad at all.
  - jorvi 3y ago
    I'm not even diabetic but they always pre-check your blood during blood / plasma donating. I would say it doesn't even register as a pinprick and feels more like the percussive slap of a tiny elastic band.
    - mikepurvis 3y ago
      Ha, I would say quite the opposite, that the finger prick is my least favourite part of giving blood— it's ironic that taking a few drops could be that much worse than the big honking needle which draws an entire pint, but I guess fingertips just have a lot of nerve endings.
      - RHSeeger 3y ago
        As a diabetic, I've always found that the finger prick for testing my blood hurt more than the insulin needles.
      - 0_____0 3y ago
        Not sure if the blood center people have a protocol for this but in athletic labs you can sample from the earlobe to take blood lactate readings
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
jxramos 3y ago
definitely, catching the "quantified self" bug is a real thing!
dkarras 3y ago
how is having low blood sugar a sign of pre-diabetes? I get frequent bouts of hypoglycemia.
- murukesh_s 3y ago
  At some point a person's body may become resistant to insulin and start to need more insulin to have normal functioning (pre-diabetes), sometimes this causes large variation in glucose levels, though not as drastic as taking a medication. Eventually your body would adapt to it when you reach the diabetes phase.
- keymasta 3y ago
  It could be related but I also want to weigh in here and say this. Hypoglycemia can occur with no relation to the other side of diabetic symptoms, i.e, hyperglycemia. In other words there are people who suffer from hypoglycemia without ever getting high blood sugar, and so they are not "diabetic" which would mean you can have issues from both directions.
bakedoatmeal 3y ago
What is the connection between being at risk of diabetes and hypoglycemia? Wouldn’t a pre-diabetic be very protected from hypoglycemia?
- ijustlovemath 3y ago
  No, diabetes is fundamentally a lack of ability to control your blood sugar. This means you get lots of highs but also lots of lows. It's a common misconception that diabetes just means your blood sugar is always high; rather, your sugar is high because your body no longer controls it actively.
  - bakedoatmeal 3y ago
    Diabetes mellitus is an insulin problem- either a lack of insulin (Type 1) or insufficient response to insulin (Type 2). Insulin is responsible for lowering blood glucose. The hormones responsible for raising blood glucose (cortisol, IGF-1, glucagon, epinephrine) still function normally. My understanding was hypoglycemia only occurs in diabetes in the presence of medications used to lower blood glucose (insulin formulations, sulfonylureas, etc.) and not because of diabetes itself, which when untreated invariably leads to hyperglycemia.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      It’s not either or, either. Some really unlucky folks end up with a hybrid and have both problems… they don’t produce enough insulin or react well to what they do.
  - cstrahan 3y ago
    I'm pretty certain you're mistaken here. Diabetes is specifically characterized by elevated blood glucose, either due to pancreas not producing enough insulin or your body becoming descensitized to insulin. You will find that diabetics often do have low blood sugar, but that's because they overestimate how much insulin they need to inect, causing their blood sugar to go too low. The hypoglycemia in this scenario is not caused by diabetes, but rather a dangerous side effect of the treatment. OP doesn't have diabetes, and (unless he's abusing insulin for body building purposes) isn't taking insulin. His postprandial hypoglycemia is likely a benign case of "reactive hypoglycemia" (https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/diabetes/expert-answers/reactive-hypoglycemia/faq-20057778 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/diabetes/expe...).
necovek 3y ago
I personally wouldn't mind having the data if a need comes up, but this is simply overtracking for no particular purpose. Basically, our bodies go through much "turmoil" over the course of any day, and watching over one too many parameters is like getting hooked to TV or a video game. Generally, medical science can mostly tell you what averages or most common patterns are, so if you do not line up with them and don't understand this, you can get overstressed. So unless you are really someone who can objectively consider your readings combined with effects you might be seeing, I'd say don't do it.
- necovek 3y ago
  And reading further, there is evidence of people getting worked up about what are not problematic readings in this very thread.
  - lynx23 3y ago
    Watching a heartrate monitor sometimes has the reserve-progress-bar effect. You know the deal. You realize the pump is on a hightened frequency, so you see what your smart watch says. And the more you watch it, the more anxious you get, so the rate stays more or less high.
    - bookofjoe 3y ago
      aka "white coat hypertension": https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-pressure/expert-answers/white-coat-hypertension/faq-20057792#:~:text=You%20could%20have%20white%20coat,pressure%20sometimes%20wear%20white%20coats https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-pr....
- TylerE 3y ago
  More importantly for life style monitoring A1C is the more important number anyway, and doesn’t require wearing anything, just a simple blood test. It’s basically a 3 month moving average.
  - 3y ago
cleandreams 3y ago
I am prediabetic and I have one. It's partly covered by insurance. By the metrics my estimated average glucose has gone down from 129 to 98 or so (normal). I haven't had my HbA1c in awhile. I think they are amazing. It's been SO HELPFUL. However I don't think it makes sense for normal people. I am on a reddit group for prediabetes and it's not unusual that people who are underweight (anorexic?) and have completely normal metrics come in and post in an utterly freaked out state. These are people who are somewhat compulsive and anxious. I think that if you are normal for blood glucose having access to all this data can make you compulsive and anxious. However, for me as a prediabetic, it is really useful. It tells you what’s going on with your blood sugar in real time with no ideology. In the beginning I was spiking from things that a nutritionist would say was OK. I found whole grains didn’t work for me. I was shocked at how much I spiked from oatmeal. What causes blood glucose spikes does not map directly to number of carbs and also every body is different. After 6 mo of lowered carbs, weight training, and getting down to normal BMI, I can now eat SMALL portions of things like brown rice. My health has improved. It's great. IMHO all prediabetics and diabetics should have one, covered by insurance. It would really improve health and reduce complications.
- TylerE 3y ago
  What’s also surprising is what doesn’t. I’ve found for instance, that potatoes, even French fries, don’t do a whole lot to mine.
- michaelcampbell 3y ago
  > I was shocked at how much I spiked from oatmeal. Was it oatmeal, or what you ate oatmeal with (milk, sweetener, etc), or do you know?
  - eternauta3k 3y ago
    Also, instant oatmeal / rolled oats / steel cut oats / the whole dang oat?
  - pwthornton 3y ago
    The people at Levels, who do continuous glucose monitoring, say that oatmeal is one of the worst offenders. You really need to spike your oatmeal with fats, protein, and fiber. I regularly eat steel-cut oats for breakfast. My go-to is steel-cut oats, two tablespoons of Chia seeds mixed in (tons of fat and fiber), and a serving of mixed nuts and berries on top. On the side, I eat four scoops of powdered peanut butter mixed with water. This version of peanut butter is much higher in protein and much lower in fat and calories than normal peanut butter. Doing all of this can keep the spikes to a reasonable amount (I also eat the powdered peanut butter first). Any kind of oatmeal by itself is bad. Instant oatmeal is worse. Instant oatmeal with all that sugar and stuff thrown in is terrible. I suspect if you made your oatmeal with milk instead of water, it would help a lot, but I can't do this from being lactose intolerant.
aledalgrande 3y ago
I actually just got one of these CGMs after listening to Peter Attia's (audio)book Outlive and started monitoring my glucose and experimenting with meals and exercise to see what effects they have. Apart from the weirdness of having something attached to your skin, it's like having another watch and you won't notice after a while. It's pretty cool and a lot more people than just diabetics would benefit from this knowledge. Like I just learned for example about resistant starches, of which one is cooled potatoes: I ate the exact same dish but the first time, right after cooking, my levels shot up (not abnormally but you should ideally never have spikes, so your body doesn't have to keep pumping insulin), and then the second time, reheated, it was like I didn't eat anything. I was surprised so I researched and found https://www.webmd.com/diet/what-to-know-resistant-starches https://www.webmd.com/diet/what-to-know-resistant-starches Everyone is different so I definitely suggest to try them out for a month and see what gives you spikes in your diet. Then try to get rid of those spikes.
- technological 3y ago
  can you post link to the device which you brought
  - mlrtime 3y ago
    Probably a Dexcom G6/G7?
  - aledalgrande 3y ago
    I'm using an Abbott Freestyle 2, but any of the available big brands that have an app would work.
- droopyEyelids 3y ago
  You got me real curious about why this is. I know there are waxy and starchy potatoes that have higher rations of amylopectin vs amylose starch respectively. One interesting thing is that if you continuously mix an amylopectin potato, it turns into a gooey, ropey substance that we don't use much in western cooking but is how some Chinese mashed potatoes are supposed to be prepared. I wonder if that transformation affects the resistance of the starch. I also wonder what exactly is making the cooled potato tougher to digest.
melagonster 3y ago
Excuse me, this is stupid question. but can't you buy Freestyle Libre?
- TylerE 3y ago
  Yes, but need a prescription.
  - melagonster 3y ago
    wow... I am sorry. in my country the condition is reversed. it cheaper than prescription version, so I ask it. good luck bro.
    - hackernews1134 3y ago
      Which county is that please? If you don’t mind sharing.
      - yurishimo 3y ago
        You can buy them OTC in most of western Europe.
      - melagonster 3y ago
        Taiwan, and Japan have same condition.
seesaw 3y ago
Were you able to find out what may have caused you to pass out ? I had a similar incident with no root cause. But that did set me on the path to become more healthy.

oldgradstudent 3y ago

> My wife, who is a physician, thought it might be hypoglycemia, since i'm at high risk for diabetes. Isn't hypoglycemia a side effect of insulin and other glucose lowing agent rather than of the diabetes itself?

lr4444lr 3y ago

What kinds of food intake/non-intake habits aside from the obvious culprits surprised you?

rodly 3y ago
Long-term they will likely make no changes because human desire, habits and behaviors are rarely unknown to us. The parent comment mentioned feeling tired after consuming something with a lot of sugar, was that really a mystery prior to using CGM? I doubt it. Sure it's interesting to correlate to your perceived wellness (or lack thereof) with a wearable spitting out data but after the novelty of this discovery wears off my guess is that people will simply stop caring to check what they already know to be the case.
- sxg 3y ago
  > The parent comment mentioned feeling tired after consuming something with a lot of sugar, was that really a mystery prior to using CGM? I doubt it. They may not have known just how sugary that item was since most people don't bother to calculate the sugar content of everything they consume, but the CGM puts a number on it. That experience could be enough to change the OPs behavior. I agree that most people may not care to make behavioral changes in response to more data, but there are definitely other people who will.
- o_____________o 3y ago
  It's more than intake. It's food order, stress, sleep, context, and so on. Did you eat enough fiber, did you add more fat this time, did you drink the night before? Did you walk afterwards? Unless your life is extremely regimented and uniform, they provide a ton of data.
- dleink 3y ago
  > Long-term they will likely make no changes because human desire, habits and behaviors are rarely unknown to us. It seems like this thinking leads to desires, habits and behaviors remaining a mystery to us.
- dog_boxer72 3y ago
  Is it really such a stretch to imagine that maybe some people really don’t correlate those things? People aren’t research papers, we have multiple cognitive distortions working all the time obfusticating the truth, but tech like this can help bypass them
- jxramos 3y ago
  there is something powerful about the objective outside-of-self confirmation of something because it eliminates the doubt that can be casted as it all being in ones head. External confirmation is enlightening and motivating.
- jeremiahbuckley 3y ago
  My view: I’m busy, I have a lot of things I’m trying to figure out. For example, All of my free time should be spent getting better at AI programming. Seemingly infinite horizon. I could carefully track a half dozen signals to correlate consumption to effect, but if the effect is “I’m tired and don’t have much willpower”, that’s hard to remember to track. I just haven’t built up that habit; heck I’m having a hard time keeping up the habit of light exercise. I have a cousin who was diagnosed with some stage of diabetes; got a continuous blood sugar monitor; ended up losing a ton of weight. I’m definitely in the market for this—something to make it easier for me. It’s undoubtedly healthier for me than mainlining wygovey, which is another option on the table.

temp_praneshp 3y ago

The ones on diabetic warehouse don't work well enough (https://www.diabeticwarehouse.org/collections/continuous-glucose-monitoring https://www.diabeticwarehouse.org/collections/continuous-glu...? Or is that site sketch for you? I think you can just get one if you are willing to burn $500 (not cheap, but only in the price range of a higher-end smartwatch)

vlabakje90 3y ago
Keep in mind that a single sensor will work for only a week or two, depending on the type. So it's not exactly right to compare the price to a smartwatch.
- temp_praneshp 3y ago
  Ah okay, thanks for telling me that; I thought you keep recharging the battery every week from the description.
  - pwthornton 3y ago
    No. They are single-use, and it embeds into your skin with a probe.

cheriot 3y ago

Thanks for confirming. Normal feedback on health habits is delayed by months/years and hard to trace back to specific actions so your story makes a lot of sense. I might have to get over my dislike of needles :|

mikenew 3y ago
It's more akin to a finger prick than a needle. Might still be a bit psychologically challenging but I've done it and it's really not bad at all.
- jorvi 3y ago
  I'm not even diabetic but they always pre-check your blood during blood / plasma donating. I would say it doesn't even register as a pinprick and feels more like the percussive slap of a tiny elastic band.
  - mikepurvis 3y ago
    Ha, I would say quite the opposite, that the finger prick is my least favourite part of giving blood— it's ironic that taking a few drops could be that much worse than the big honking needle which draws an entire pint, but I guess fingertips just have a lot of nerve endings.
    - RHSeeger 3y ago
      As a diabetic, I've always found that the finger prick for testing my blood hurt more than the insulin needles.
    - 0_____0 3y ago
      Not sure if the blood center people have a protocol for this but in athletic labs you can sample from the earlobe to take blood lactate readings
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

jxramos 3y ago

definitely, catching the "quantified self" bug is a real thing!

dkarras 3y ago

how is having low blood sugar a sign of pre-diabetes? I get frequent bouts of hypoglycemia.

murukesh_s 3y ago
At some point a person's body may become resistant to insulin and start to need more insulin to have normal functioning (pre-diabetes), sometimes this causes large variation in glucose levels, though not as drastic as taking a medication. Eventually your body would adapt to it when you reach the diabetes phase.
keymasta 3y ago
It could be related but I also want to weigh in here and say this. Hypoglycemia can occur with no relation to the other side of diabetic symptoms, i.e, hyperglycemia. In other words there are people who suffer from hypoglycemia without ever getting high blood sugar, and so they are not "diabetic" which would mean you can have issues from both directions.

bakedoatmeal 3y ago

What is the connection between being at risk of diabetes and hypoglycemia? Wouldn’t a pre-diabetic be very protected from hypoglycemia?

ijustlovemath 3y ago
No, diabetes is fundamentally a lack of ability to control your blood sugar. This means you get lots of highs but also lots of lows. It's a common misconception that diabetes just means your blood sugar is always high; rather, your sugar is high because your body no longer controls it actively.
- bakedoatmeal 3y ago
  Diabetes mellitus is an insulin problem- either a lack of insulin (Type 1) or insufficient response to insulin (Type 2). Insulin is responsible for lowering blood glucose. The hormones responsible for raising blood glucose (cortisol, IGF-1, glucagon, epinephrine) still function normally. My understanding was hypoglycemia only occurs in diabetes in the presence of medications used to lower blood glucose (insulin formulations, sulfonylureas, etc.) and not because of diabetes itself, which when untreated invariably leads to hyperglycemia.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    It’s not either or, either. Some really unlucky folks end up with a hybrid and have both problems… they don’t produce enough insulin or react well to what they do.
- cstrahan 3y ago
  I'm pretty certain you're mistaken here. Diabetes is specifically characterized by elevated blood glucose, either due to pancreas not producing enough insulin or your body becoming descensitized to insulin. You will find that diabetics often do have low blood sugar, but that's because they overestimate how much insulin they need to inect, causing their blood sugar to go too low. The hypoglycemia in this scenario is not caused by diabetes, but rather a dangerous side effect of the treatment. OP doesn't have diabetes, and (unless he's abusing insulin for body building purposes) isn't taking insulin. His postprandial hypoglycemia is likely a benign case of "reactive hypoglycemia" (https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/diabetes/expert-answers/reactive-hypoglycemia/faq-20057778 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/diabetes/expe...).

necovek 3y ago

I personally wouldn't mind having the data if a need comes up, but this is simply overtracking for no particular purpose. Basically, our bodies go through much "turmoil" over the course of any day, and watching over one too many parameters is like getting hooked to TV or a video game. Generally, medical science can mostly tell you what averages or most common patterns are, so if you do not line up with them and don't understand this, you can get overstressed. So unless you are really someone who can objectively consider your readings combined with effects you might be seeing, I'd say don't do it.

necovek 3y ago
And reading further, there is evidence of people getting worked up about what are not problematic readings in this very thread.
- lynx23 3y ago
  Watching a heartrate monitor sometimes has the reserve-progress-bar effect. You know the deal. You realize the pump is on a hightened frequency, so you see what your smart watch says. And the more you watch it, the more anxious you get, so the rate stays more or less high.
  - bookofjoe 3y ago
    aka "white coat hypertension": https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-pressure/expert-answers/white-coat-hypertension/faq-20057792#:~:text=You%20could%20have%20white%20coat,pressure%20sometimes%20wear%20white%20coats https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-pr....
TylerE 3y ago
More importantly for life style monitoring A1C is the more important number anyway, and doesn’t require wearing anything, just a simple blood test. It’s basically a 3 month moving average.
- 3y ago

cleandreams 3y ago

I am prediabetic and I have one. It's partly covered by insurance. By the metrics my estimated average glucose has gone down from 129 to 98 or so (normal). I haven't had my HbA1c in awhile. I think they are amazing. It's been SO HELPFUL. However I don't think it makes sense for normal people. I am on a reddit group for prediabetes and it's not unusual that people who are underweight (anorexic?) and have completely normal metrics come in and post in an utterly freaked out state. These are people who are somewhat compulsive and anxious. I think that if you are normal for blood glucose having access to all this data can make you compulsive and anxious. However, for me as a prediabetic, it is really useful. It tells you what’s going on with your blood sugar in real time with no ideology. In the beginning I was spiking from things that a nutritionist would say was OK. I found whole grains didn’t work for me. I was shocked at how much I spiked from oatmeal. What causes blood glucose spikes does not map directly to number of carbs and also every body is different. After 6 mo of lowered carbs, weight training, and getting down to normal BMI, I can now eat SMALL portions of things like brown rice. My health has improved. It's great. IMHO all prediabetics and diabetics should have one, covered by insurance. It would really improve health and reduce complications.

TylerE 3y ago
What’s also surprising is what doesn’t. I’ve found for instance, that potatoes, even French fries, don’t do a whole lot to mine.
michaelcampbell 3y ago
> I was shocked at how much I spiked from oatmeal. Was it oatmeal, or what you ate oatmeal with (milk, sweetener, etc), or do you know?
- eternauta3k 3y ago
  Also, instant oatmeal / rolled oats / steel cut oats / the whole dang oat?
- pwthornton 3y ago
  The people at Levels, who do continuous glucose monitoring, say that oatmeal is one of the worst offenders. You really need to spike your oatmeal with fats, protein, and fiber. I regularly eat steel-cut oats for breakfast. My go-to is steel-cut oats, two tablespoons of Chia seeds mixed in (tons of fat and fiber), and a serving of mixed nuts and berries on top. On the side, I eat four scoops of powdered peanut butter mixed with water. This version of peanut butter is much higher in protein and much lower in fat and calories than normal peanut butter. Doing all of this can keep the spikes to a reasonable amount (I also eat the powdered peanut butter first). Any kind of oatmeal by itself is bad. Instant oatmeal is worse. Instant oatmeal with all that sugar and stuff thrown in is terrible. I suspect if you made your oatmeal with milk instead of water, it would help a lot, but I can't do this from being lactose intolerant.

aledalgrande 3y ago

I actually just got one of these CGMs after listening to Peter Attia's (audio)book Outlive and started monitoring my glucose and experimenting with meals and exercise to see what effects they have. Apart from the weirdness of having something attached to your skin, it's like having another watch and you won't notice after a while. It's pretty cool and a lot more people than just diabetics would benefit from this knowledge. Like I just learned for example about resistant starches, of which one is cooled potatoes: I ate the exact same dish but the first time, right after cooking, my levels shot up (not abnormally but you should ideally never have spikes, so your body doesn't have to keep pumping insulin), and then the second time, reheated, it was like I didn't eat anything. I was surprised so I researched and found https://www.webmd.com/diet/what-to-know-resistant-starches https://www.webmd.com/diet/what-to-know-resistant-starches Everyone is different so I definitely suggest to try them out for a month and see what gives you spikes in your diet. Then try to get rid of those spikes.

technological 3y ago
can you post link to the device which you brought
- mlrtime 3y ago
  Probably a Dexcom G6/G7?
- aledalgrande 3y ago
  I'm using an Abbott Freestyle 2, but any of the available big brands that have an app would work.
droopyEyelids 3y ago
You got me real curious about why this is. I know there are waxy and starchy potatoes that have higher rations of amylopectin vs amylose starch respectively. One interesting thing is that if you continuously mix an amylopectin potato, it turns into a gooey, ropey substance that we don't use much in western cooking but is how some Chinese mashed potatoes are supposed to be prepared. I wonder if that transformation affects the resistance of the starch. I also wonder what exactly is making the cooled potato tougher to digest.

melagonster 3y ago

Excuse me, this is stupid question. but can't you buy Freestyle Libre?

TylerE 3y ago
Yes, but need a prescription.
- melagonster 3y ago
  wow... I am sorry. in my country the condition is reversed. it cheaper than prescription version, so I ask it. good luck bro.
  - hackernews1134 3y ago
    Which county is that please? If you don’t mind sharing.
    - yurishimo 3y ago
      You can buy them OTC in most of western Europe.
    - melagonster 3y ago
      Taiwan, and Japan have same condition.

seesaw 3y ago

Were you able to find out what may have caused you to pass out ? I had a similar incident with no root cause. But that did set me on the path to become more healthy.