I found this via Nina Teicholz's twitter:

CGM Experiment: What I Learned As A Non-Diabetic From Wearing A Continuous Glucose Monitor

TL;DR: It's pretty much what most of us would expect. You might not catch BG spikes with a finger stick glucometer.

Next, her "healthy" oatmeal experiment, and she specifies that "All things considered, this was NOT a large bowl of oatmeal and it was essentially NOT sweet, despite adding a little honey. (I say this to point out that the average person adds A LOT of extra sweeteners to their oatmeal, either with sugar/honey or dried fruit. My version would be unpalatable to many people.)"

Dr Gary Fettke's response, which gives me hope: Let's cross our fingers.

Fascinating read Kristina. Thank you for sharing. I'm heading up to Canada this summer to attend a music festival. Since apparently no prescription is needed for a GCM up there, I think I'll see if I can't find one to back with me.



I'd love to see a qualified researcher recruit a bunch of healthy people who already eat a variety of diets, outfit them all with GCMs to track their blood sugar, fitbits to track their activity-levels, and smart phones to take before-and-after pictures of all their meals and snacks and drinks. (Before and after pics so the researchers could more accurately gauge how much the subject actually ate.)



Given that so many Americans are already diabetic or pre-diabetic (based only on their HbA1C numbers), the researchers would probably have to recruit normal-weight college-age students to find enough allegedly healthy individuals.



But it could be a real eye-opener to see how various meals affect the BG of allegedly healthy people who are already used to eating those kinds of meals.



Seems like, at the very least, doctors would want to know what normal healthy BG numbers really look like and how normal healthy individual BG is affected by various foods. Clearly they don't yet have that info.


Maybe the manufactures of GCMs would be willing to fund such a study.

I had this happen a while back and wondered if it was normal. (I pricked and pricked and pricked to really see what was going on)
So is Nina diabetic or pre-diabetic, does anyone know?
Rising up to 170s, is that normal? Even though it drops back down to the normal range?

Wow, what a find. And if it said bad things about Keto, it would be ALL over the place.

She is a diabetes counselor with diet-managed cases of gestational diabetes and a family history.

Ohhhh so if I ate some dessert at a b-day party and that happened but not with rice, anybody know what that means?
Maybe that's just normal until the insulin shoots out to lower the BS?

IMO, it’s normal, but still bad - like how it’s normal to have a nasty allergic reaction after you touch poison ivy or pass out after drinking a ton of alcohol. I think that’s what she was getting at - the diagnostic process doesn’t account for all of the potential damage being done to folks who are technically/diagnostically “normal”/non-diabetic.

Just to clarify, this isn’t Nina - it’s Lily Nichols, an RD and diabetes educator who specializes in gestational diabetes. She’s a LCer and quite slim - sounds like the exact person who “should” be able to tolerate some rice and oatmeal here and there. Pretty eye-opening.

Normal for a population that is eating a diet high in carbs and modern processed foods is not going to be the same as healthy or optimal. Normal would look a lot different if it was based on a population of people eating low carb.