Wink Health: Making Five Guys Less Fattening

Wink Health: Making Five Guys Less Fattening
winkhealth.com

http://www.taylorfarms.com/products/organic-salads/baby-kale...

This is an unreasonable amount of kale :-). I'm going to need to figure out a better meal:kale ratio or use a different vegetable side.

Actually, you're right. They're minutes. I started sampling my blood glucose when I started eating. Let me go ahead and add annotations to some of those data points, especially the data points that correspond to the end of the meal.

I sampled my blood glucose every ten minutes, which might have been unnecessarily frequent. Having to interrupt myself every ten minutes to do a pinprick prevented me from doing anything that required concentration. I basically found myself watching YouTube videos for two hours.

I've heard of people doing continuous blood glucose monitoring, but this may be a bit heavyweight. I really only have to do this a few times for a few different meals to get an idea of what is needed by my body.

Here's a few other things that reducing insulin does:

1. Decreases amino acid uptake

2. Decreases potassium uptake

3. Reduces brain insulin signaling, reducing control of energy homeostatis.

Insulin, in isolation, isn't bad. It helps increase muscle and improves cognition. What is bad is the way it fluctuates in the body and the ability for the body to regulate glucose and insulin efficiently. It's perfectly normal for a healthy individual to have a blood glucose reading of 140-150 after a carb-heavy meal. The key is how long does it take for their glucose to reduce back down to healthy levels (70-100). If it's 2 hours or less, you're fine. If it's longer than that, now you've got issues. Even then, acute blood glucose levels can vary wildly from individual to individual, particularly if they're on a ketogenic diet low in carbs, and that may report actually higher than normal (because you're constantly looking to the body to make glucose instead of food, so basal levels must remain higher).

Fear not glucose and insulin. Fear insulin resistance and glucose intolerance.

So getting back to the title of the article, the more practical way of making Five Guys less fattening is not to surround a burger in a basket of kale in your stomach, but to either (A) not eat the burger in the first place or (B) improve your insulin resistance/glucose tolerance. All that the article's experiment would do (in reality) is reduce your desire to eat a burger because your stomach is filled with kale - slow or fast, your body still had to break down and consume that burger. But if you exercise, eat right most of the time, and keep your vices in moderation, your improved lipid profile, fasting insulin, fasting glucose (and A1C), and insulin resistance/glucose tolerance will allow you to more efficiently process that burger so it is not as taxing on your body as it would be if you were not as healthy.