What Your Microbiome Wants for Dinner

Now I'm at 314.

And also, watch out about the a1c. They are not reliable readings to use in diagnosis. Studies from last year show a very skewed weighted average from the last 3 months that generate the a1c. Also, if you have any sort of hemoglobin-modifying illness (sickle cell, others), a1c is completely inaccurate.

140mg/dL is scientifically known to kill nerve cells. Every minute above this kills stuff. The ideal healthy human's response is between 85-100mg/dL. A resting rate away from this shows dysfunction.

However, an OGTT shows if you have problems. You take a reading prior to drinking 75g glucose. One big drink. Then you test every 30 minutes until you're back to normal, which is usually 2-2.5 hours. A doc won't say it, but every minute over 140 causes cell death, and most likely lower.

For example, this is what 12 carbs did to me:

     18:20 12/09/2015	test		143
     18:35 12/09/2015	eat	15m	
     19:15 12/09/2015	test		182
     19:30 12/09/2015	test		172
     19:45 12/09/2015	test		168
     20:00 12/09/2015	test		150
     20:15 12/09/2015	test		144
     20:30 12/09/2015	test		123

I'm not suggesting it isn't but your dismissive comment doesn't enlighten those who are not aware of the controversy.

~2 billion base pairs * ~1 in a billion error rate = 2 mutations per generation (on average)

Edit: Slight clarification and a brief (and greatly oversimplified) lesson on how this works.

Let Ne = effective population size. And I'll define "fitness effect" as the advantage conferred by a particular mutation in a particular fitness landscape. e.g., If you're an E. coli, the fitness conferred by penicillin resistance is very high if you're sitting in a pool of penicillin, but generally mildly negative otherwise because you're wasting energy.

When the fitness effect size is much larger in magnitude than 1/Ne (or 1/2Ne if you're diploid, like us), the fate of the gene is largely determined by natural selection. (But add the occasional coin toss in there b/c the real world is messy.)

When the fitness effect size is much smaller in magnitude than 1/Ne, the fate of the gene is largely determined by genetic drift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift (tl;dr Mostly chance mod a few other effects, like if the mutation of interest has a physical location close to another mutation with strong selection pressure)

However, there are slightly deleterious or slightly advantageous mutations, whose fitness effect size is close to 1/Ne (or 1/2Ne for diploids), and things get kinda interesting, because it's a combination of genetic drift and natural selection. For instance, if it's a slightly deleterious mutation, it will decrease Ne slightly (increasing the proportion of mutations that are considered neutral of the new value of Ne), and the previously "slightly deleterious" mutation may now be effectively neutral for the new value of Ne.

There is a lot of evidence that the "slightly" deleterious and the "slightly" advantageous mutations contribute substantially to evolutionary dynamics.

This is further complicated by the fact that the fitness (whether a mutation is deleterious or advantageous) is not constant everywhere geographically, or over time.