mind & bodyanalysisThe Conversation (UK)
Blood sugar spikes: what actually works to manage them
Blood glucose rises after every meal containing carbohydrate, as insulin from the pancreas helps cells use or store it, so a rise on a wearable monitor is normal, not a warning. For people without diabetes, the benefit of flattening every spike is uncertain, and a recent review found gaps between dramatic claims about harmful spikes and the evidence. What shifts the response: fibre-rich foods such as beans and wholegrains, the whole meal rather than glycaemic index alone (fat can delay a rise without lowering it overall), and eating vegetables or protein before carbohydrate, which cut the early rise in a review of six small studies. Movement helps too: muscles take up glucose without needing insulin, and a ten-minute walk after a sugary drink lowered the response in a small trial.
After a meal, carbohydrate is broken into glucose, which enters the blood. Insulin signals tissues to absorb it. Fibre and other foods slow digestion, and working muscle can pull glucose in directly, so both flatten the curve.
Most of these habits are good for health anyway, but chasing a flat line on a monitor is not proven to prevent disease. Regular exercise has far stronger evidence than any single trick.
Insulin was first used to treat a patient in 1922, in Toronto.
background
A postprandial glucose (PPG) test is a blood glucose test that determines the amount of glucose in the plasma after a meal. The diagnosis is typically restricted to postprandial hyperglycemia due to lack of strong evidence of co-relation with a diagnosis of diabetes.
The American Diabetes Association does not recommend a PPG test for determining diabetes, but it notes that postprandial hyperglycemia does contribute to elevated glycated hemoglobin levels (a primary factor behind diabetes) and recommends testing and management of PPG levels for those patients who maintain optimum pre-prandial blood glucose levels but have high A1C values.
Carbohydrates in the form of glucose are one of the main constituents of foods, and assimilation starts within about 10 minutes. The subsequent rate of absorption of carbohydrates in conjunction with the resultant rates of secretion of insulin and glucagon secretion affects the time-weighed PPG profile.
From Wikipedia: Postprandial glucose test (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗ · text CC BY-SA 4.0
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Illustrative photo · Jakob Suckale, Michele Solimena, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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