Measure your sugar intake
It’s easy. Diabetics do it all the time. You can too
We have to start with a disclaimer: this post is not medical advice. Please consult a doctor. That said, if you came here after our post on sugar…
…you’re probably wondering just how much sugar you’re consuming daily. There’s sugar in pretty much everything you eat today. It doesn’t matter if it was added or natural, because it’s all the same to your body.
The food industry has gone overboard with using sugar. It’s present whether the food is packaged and branded or from a cottage industry. Even savoury foods have sugar in them. Gourmet restaurants who should know better put sugar in their food. Most use of sugar may not be as blatant as this, but it’s still there:
What is one to do? Who do you trust when even the mandatory ingredient labels are artfully constructed to mislead, or are just plain incorrect and never been verified by the food regulator? When even the healthy salad you ordered comes with sugary dressing drizzled on it?
Trust your own body. Do what anyone with diabetes does. Get a blood sugar monitor and test yourself before and after every meal. Walk down to the nearest pharmacy and buy one. You may find the experience embarrassing, like the first time you buy a condom (“I’m not diabetic, I’m only curious, hehe”), but you do care about metrics, right? It’s a Sunday, so do this in the privacy of your own home without the embarrassment of looking like a druggie shooting up after lunch at work.
Modern blood sugar monitors are affordable, easy to use and painless. Here’s a video demonstrating how to use one.
Test yourself before and after every meal, and keep a log of what you ate and how it affected your blood sugar. Keep your standard diet routine for a few days, then start substituting foods that spike your blood sugar with foods that don’t. When you have a spike, it will inevitably be followed by a crash (a “sugar crash”) that will leave you feeling lethargic and wanting to consume more sugary food. The sugar consumption cycle propels itself.
There’s no universally correct diet. This will only work for you if you can identify the safe-to-eat items from food you already like eating.
Keep your logs with an app like Blood Glucose Tracker (Android; iOS app recommendations appreciated).
Understanding blood sugar
The average adult human body has about five litres of blood in it, and a mere five grams of glucose in the blood. That’s about one teaspoon of sugar. (The term “blood sugar” refers to glucose.) When you consume sugar, the constituent glucose and fructose parts are rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream as they enter the small intestine. Your pancreas secretes the hormone insulin in response to the glucose, which then carries glucose around your body to cells for their energy needs. Excess glucose (and almost all of the fructose) is carried to your liver where it’s stored as glycogen and released again when the insulin stops circulating. When the glycogen store is full, however, excess glucose is converted into fatty acids for long term storage as body fat.
Yesterday, we discussed the particular dangers of fructose in your diet. Excess glucose is merely stored as fat. Fructose wreaks havoc. Your blood sugar meter only measures glucose. How do you know how much fructose you are consuming?
You’ll have to rely on a simple heuristic here: most sugars, whether added or natural, are roughly half glucose and half fructose.
However, there’s another major source of glucose in your diet, the starch component of carbohydrate (together the “net carbs” we discussed). Starch is broken down into maltose (a glucose+glucose disaccharide) by your saliva and then split again before absorption in your intestine. The glucose from starch (especially refined flour) hits your bloodstream as quickly as the glucose from sugar, probably overwhelms your body’s need to use or store it, and then get stored away as fat.
It’s not fructose, but it’ll still make you fat. Regulating your food intake to prevent those spikes is good for you even if it’s from carbs and not sugars.
Your liver releases glucose from the glycogen store when insulin levels are low, so sometimes you’ll see blood sugar above the normal range even when you’ve eaten nothing.
Choosing a blood glucose monitor
There are multiple brands in the market. Here is how you pick:
- Ask your pharmacist. The people who typically buy these devices aren’t quantified self geeks but diabetics with a serious requirement. Pharmacists have a good sense for what their patients trust.
- These devices use the razor-and-blades business model that Gillette uses to sell you overpriced three, four and five blade razors. There’s the one-time device purchase and then there’s (for diabetics) a lifetime supply of test strips. Ask for the price of those strips. If you’re consuming four meals and testing in between as well, that’s about ten strips a day. Strips are sold in packs of 50 and 100. Assuming you only want to do this for two weeks, consider the price of a device plus a hundred strip pack.
- Some monitors come with a “coding chip”, a DRM system to prevent you from sharing strips. The coding chip can be a nuisance as you get a new chip in each box of strips and may accidentally mix them up. Avoid.
- To draw blood, the monitor comes with a lancing device that requires a tiny needle called a lancet that’s meant to be single use. It’s making contact with your blood, after all. An anecdotal survey says most regular users reuse their lancets, but your hygiene standards may be higher (for good reason). You can buy an off-brand lancet pack cheaper than the official pack, but confirm compatibility.
- A new type of device is now in the market—a Continuous Glucose Monitor. Abbott makes one called the Freestyle Libre. It’s a coin-sized single use device with a tiny needle that you apply to your skin and leave in place for two weeks. It transmits data over NFC to a dedicated reader (separate purchase) or to your NFC-enabled phone. In true spirit of the name “Libre”, it has an open API and many compatible apps. Availability is spotty in India, so your pharmacist may not be able to obtain one for you—and you may not be keen to spend a few thousands on a device that only lasts two weeks.
Monitors sold in India report readings in milligrams per decilitre (mg/dl) instead of the SI standard of millimoles per litre (mmol/l). Your fasting blood glucose level should be within 70–100 mg/dl. Hyperglycemia or high blood sugar is a condition in which your blood sugar level is higher than 200 mg/dl. Hyperglycemic is when it’s consistently 100–126 mg/dl and indicates a risk of diabetes (“pre-diabetic”). If you think this is happening to you, consult a doctor!
You may be surprised at just how many foods traditionally regarded as healthy turn out to be sugar bombs. Our traditions aren’t that much better than modern food because “tradition” is anything we grew up with — it may have been a bad habit introduced as recently as our parents’ generation.
Do normal people do this?
They don’t, but you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t care. This writer did it when starting on a new diet. Fitness entrepreneur Vishal Gondal does. Bangalore-based geek and co-host of DataMeet, Thejesh GN, took it a lot further, getting a DNA test first to estimate the genetic risks, then logging glucose data with an extensive write-up and raw data dumps.
You’ve already got your weight and a blood test for your metrics. Those are only good once a day and once in a few months. Get a blood sugar monitor now—it measures the impact of every single meal.
Kilter is HasGeek’s humble attempt to provide a space for reasoned debate on how your body actually works, and how you can find your own path to good health via better nutrition, fitness and habits.
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