Jeffrey Bland, PhD provides an update from Day 8 of a continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) study in which participants fast overnight and then test a different food product each day to examine its glycemic response. In this segment he reports that a tofu lunch produced a large glucose spike — rising to almost 120 milligram percent from an average of about 65 milligram percent — contrasts high spikes from white bread with flattened curves from low-glycemic foods like tartary buckwheat, and explains how repeated high blood-sugar excursions contribute to higher hemoglobin A1C and downstream vascular and immune damage. He encourages continued participation and monitoring.
Questions this video answers
Participants fast overnight, then eat a single test food the next morning/day while wearing a CGM.
It rose to almost 120 milligram percent.
About 65 milligram percent.
Chapters
Well, here we are once again. I know this is kind of getting a little boring, but this is actually very interesting for us. We're still involved with the CGM continuous glucose monitoring study. And I just wanted to remind you exactly what we're doing each day. We're testing, after we're fasting overnight, a different food product to examine its glycemic response. And then, you know, we're taking our little app for the CGM and we're checking it over here, I think. There we go. And then we're looking at what. Whoops, we're just a second. We're looking at what the curve looks like. So there's me today. And you'll notice that there's a big spike. That was a spike of testing a tofu lunch. And so I got a pretty good glycemic response of that. It went up. You know, my blood sugar went up to almost 120 milligram percent when it has been averaging about 65 milligram percent. So that told me something about the way that my body responds specifically to that kind of meal. And it's much, much different than when we were testing some of these low glycemic index products. You might recall when we looked at white bread, it formed the Andes mountain, that's the one in the middle, that big spike. And when we look, looked at things that had low glycemic response, what we found is that they had a very flattened curve. So if we compared white bread, you can see the big spike there compared to tartery buckwheat. We saw, given the same amount of exposure to carbohydrate, a very much lower response. Now, what this really means over time is that every day your body is going through 24,7 a response to whatever your lifestyle is giving it in terms of food, stress, environmental exposure, exercise, sleep. And that's then reflected in your endocrine system's response to control blood sugar through all the hormones that modify how your body responds to those variables. And over time, over the course of months or weeks, your blood cells then would pick up that sugar if it's very high, and that would then react chemically that sugar in your blood glucose with the hemoglobin in your blood cells to produce what's called glycohemoglobin or hemoglobin A1C. And so we know the higher the percentage of A1C in the blood, then the more your body has been having a tough time dealing with sugar and the more it's sticking sugar onto protein, which then damages the protein. So A1C is a measurement of the injury that your body is receiving from too high a level of sugar because your body is not managing it properly. So when we're looking at these kinds of curves where we have a very low glycemic response, where the curve is low, what we're looking at is the sugar in our blood is not going to be as likely to react with proteins like hemoglobin and that's going to then lead to better function over time and lowered potential risk to injury that could relate to vascular injury in our blood cells or in our vascular tissues in our endothelium and heart. And it affects the immune system in a favorable way as well. So that's what we've been studying is how diet, lifestyle influence these variables. And we're all learning a tremendous amount each day about this, so keep in touch. We've got several more days yet to go, but I just wanted to keep you informed as to where we are in this whole process. Thanks.
