Constant fear-mongering by low-carb cranks about blood glucose and insulin spikes causing/indicating diabetes got me a little worried lately.  Well, not really, but, I wanted to see how I measured up to the Kraft OGTT patterns that LCHF advocate Dr. Jeffry Gerber presents in his talks.  I saw the FreeStyle Precision Neo blood glucose meter for about $20, and 50 testing strips for another $20 at the store yesterday.  So I figured I’d spend $40 to see if 3 years of losing weight on a high-carb, low-fat diet is killing me or not.

Instead of 100g of glucose for breakfast, I ran the test with a more appetizing 140g of homemade sourdough Rye bread with 5g of butter.  This totals about 450 kcal, similar to 100g of glucose, but admittedly with a much lower glycemic index of 41 or so (like it matters).  Anyway, the current fear-mongering is that grains, especially bread, will kill you, so I figured I wasn’t cheating too much.

Surprisingly, my transient response was much better than I thought it’d be.  Based on all the Jimmy Moore podcasts I listen to regularly, I thought it’d spike to around 300 mg/dL, and maybe never come down 🙂  Instead, my fasting blood glucose (FBG) was only 83 mg/dL (lower than I remember a few years ago), and the post-prandial response was basically over in an hour.  Then I slowly returned to my FBG in the low 80’s.

This was pretty encouraging that my high-carb, low-fat (HCLF) diet isn’t killing me.  I eat ad libitum, and although I eat lots of refined flours, I make sure to exercise and eat a lot of greens and vegetables too.  I also drink a lot of sugar in the form of fruit smoothies (and Cokes on long bike rides), but I probably burn a lot of calories riding 200 km/wk.  So far, it’s been easy to maintain my >25kg weight loss, which I attribute to veggies and exercise.