Month: August 2021

Weekly Update & Health Statistics: 8/29/21

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Note: I’m switching these updates to posting the week of, instead of a 1-week lag

I’m always looking for collaborators for future experiments. If you’re interested in collaborating on scientifically rigorous self-experiments with low-carb foods, supplements, or other health interventions, please let me know in the comments or via the contact form on the right.

I’ve migrated the site from Blogger to WordPress. WordPress gives me a ton more control over formatting and saves a lot of time I used to spend dealing with bugs in Blogger on copy/paste of links and resolution of photos. This is the first post written with the WordPress editor. Hope you all like the new formatting (I do). I’ll keep working on it, but let me know if there’s anything you’d particularly like to see.

On the food effect study, I posted the testing results for low-carb ice-cream this week. Lot’s of great recommendations for additional brands to test, which I’ll add to my testing queue.

Experiments focused on finishing up testing of low-carb breads. Almost all have a high blood glucose impact (40-60% of glucose based on area under the curve), but I found a few that have lower BG impact (Carb0naut, Base Culture, & LC Foods). I’m still waiting for the last two samples to come in. Depending on which day they show up, I may have to delay the report a week.

In the meantime, I’ve started testing “audience requests” from my previous posts, as well as some ingredients that have been showing up in some of the products (sacha inchi seeds, glycerin, various flour replacements).


– QD

Active & Planned Experiments

  • Comprehensive Bloodwork
    • Goal: Establish baseline for a broad range of biomarkers and check overall health
    • Approach: WellnessFX Premium panel
    • Status: Complete, need to write up.
  • Blood Glucose Impact of Low-Carb Foods
    • Goal: Determine blood glucose impact of low-carb foods, supplements, and ingredients
    • Approach: Protocol
    • Status:
      • This week: 4 breads, sacha inchi seeds, and 2 tortillas recommended by commenters
      • Reported:
      • Up next:
        • Bread (hopefully 9/4, but may be delayed based on last samples)
        • Commenter requests (9/4 or 9/11)
  • Methods of Sleeping Longer

Let me know in the comments if there’s any other experiments you’d like to see.

Observations & Data

Continue reading “Weekly Update & Health Statistics: 8/29/21” →

Weekly Update & Health Statistics: 8/16 – 8/22/21

For those checking the dates, I post these with a 1-week lag. 

After 6 weeks, I’ve finally finished my blinded study of melatonin to increase sleep duration. Unfortunately, melatonin didn’t have any effect on my sleep duration, but I learned a lot about how (and how not) to measure sleep. Based on the results, I’m going to keep manually recording how I slept when I wake up and see if I can identify any patterns I missed when previously looking only at data collected from my watch.

On the food effect study, this week focused on low-carb breads. So far, almost all have a high blood glucose impact (40-60% of glucose based on area under the curve), but I got a bunch more recommendations from Reddit that seem promising and will be testing next week.

I simplified these status updates. Let me know if you do/don’t like the new format.

– QD

Active & Planned Experiments

  • Comprehensive bloodwork:
    • Goal: Establish baseline for a broad range of biomarkers and check overall health
    • Approach: WellnessFX Premium panel
    • Status: Complete, need to write up.
  • Blood glucose impact of low-carb foods
    • Goal: Check blood glucose impact of new low-carb foods I’d like to incorporate into my diet
    • Approach: Follow the same protocol from my previous study
    • Status:
  • Methods of sleeping longer:


Observations & Data

  • Sleep:
    • Two nights of insomnia this week resulted in a much lower average time asleep. Likely cause was my wife quarantining due to a COVID exposure (she’s fine). I always sleep poorly when she’s away.
  • Blood glucose:
    • Everything looking good. Still keeping an eye on positive trends in coefficient of variation, fasting BG, and time in range to see if they’re real.
  • Body:
    • I was able to stabilize my weight this week by adding an extra 200 calories to breakfast and continuing to eat more for dinner. I’m going to cut back on the dinner to finish my weight loss, but nice to see I know how to stop it when the time comes.
    • Interestingly, change in waist measurement also flatlined, suggesting that I’m not doing any body recomposition, just straight weight loss.
  • Blood:
    • Hemoglobin was the lowest I’ve seen yet, close to the bottom end of the normal range. Keeping an eye on this…
    • Pulse continues to drop on both the Omron (resting) and Apple Watch (sleeping & awake).
    • Blood pressure has came back down a bit.
Blood

Body
Sleep

 

Methods

Measurements: 
  • Sleep:
    • Metrics: total time, heart rate variability, pulse (sleeping vs. waking)
    • Method: Apple watch + Autosleep app
    • Frequency: daily
  • Blood glucose:
    • Metrics: fasting BG, Avg. BG, coefficient of variation, time 70-140 mg/dL, time <60 mg/dL
    • Method: Dexcom G6 CGM
    • Frequency: continuous
  • Body:
    • Metrics: weight, waist circumference, BMI, waist/height
    • Method: scale + Renpho tape measure
    • Frequency: weekly
  • Other blood:
    • Metrics: hemoglobin, cholesterol, blood pressure, pulse
    • Method: Hemocue 801, Cardiocheck PA, Omron 10
    • Frequency: weekly for blood pressure & pulse, every 2 weeks for hemoglobin & cholesterol

Data Processing & Visualization. Data was visualized using Tableau.

Data: here

Low-Carb Ice Cream: How do different Brands Affect my Blood Glucose?

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This post is an update on my experiments measuring the effect of low-carb foods and dietary supplements on blood sugar.

This week, I have the results from low-carb ice creams. Next week I’ll have low-carb breads.

 

Testing Queue:

 
Ice Cream
 
Summary:

I tested 6 low-carb ice creams from 4 brands (Enlightened, Halo Top, Keto, & Rebel).

All held up to their claims, with relatively low blood sugar impact and taste similar to regular ice cream.

The 6 ice creams  had relatively similar blood glucose impact by weight (3-4% of glucose for peak BG/g & 7-10% for iAuC/g) and volume (18-27 mg/dL/cup peak BG & 3,200-4,600 mg/dL/cup iAuC). Of the set, the Keto brand ice cream was ~25% higher than the next worst. Not enough to stop me from eating it, but noticeably worse.

On taste, my favorites were the Rebel Chocolate and Cookies & Cream, but they were all pretty good except for the Keto Triple Chocolate Brownie. Keto brand used erythritol as the only sweetener in the brownie pieces and it crystallized, giving a gritty texture that I really didn’t like. It also didn’t have a strong enough chocolate flavor for my taste.

Does anyone know any other good low-carb ice creams or other low-carb foods I should try?

Continue reading “Low-Carb Ice Cream: How do different Brands Affect my Blood Glucose?” →

New Site Design

I’ve migrated this site from Blogger to WordPress. This will allow me a lot more control over post formatting, graphics, and widgets that will hopefully make the site easier to read and more useful to the audience.

Post formatting is a bit wonky due to the new theme, so please bear with me for a week or so while I get that sorted out. In the meantime, posts will continue and all old links should still work. If you notice anything broken, please let me know.

Weekly Update & Health Statistics: 8/8 – 8/14/21

For those checking the dates, I post these with a 1-week lag. 

Summary:

Active & Planned Experiments

  • Comprehensive bloodwork:
    • Goal: Establish baseline for a broad range of biomarkers and check overall health
    • Approach: WellnessFX Premium panel
    • Status: Complete, need to write up.
  • Testing blood glucose impact of low-carb foods
    • Goal: Check blood glucose impact of new low-carb foods I’d like to incorporate into my diet
    • Approach: Follow the same protocol from my previous study
    • Status:
      • Baseline:
        • Glucose re-test: In queue
      • Low-carb foods:
      • Supplements:
  • Testing methods of sleeping longer:
    • Goals:
      • To determine if taking melatonin supplements in the evening extends the duration of my time asleep and subjective fatigue given a consistent bedtime.
      • To determine if taking melatonin supplement and/or sleeping longer affects subjective fatigue, blood glucose, heart rate variability, or pulse
    • Approach: here
    • Status: Data collection complete. Ready to analyze.


What I’m tracking

  • Sleep: 
    • Metrics: total time, heart rate variability, pulse (sleeping vs. waking)
    • Method: Apple watch + Autosleep app
    • Frequency: daily
  • Blood glucose:
    • Metrics: fasting BG, Avg. BG, coefficient of variation, time 70-140 mg/dL, time <60 mg/dL
    • Method: Dexcom G6 CGM
    • Frequency: continuous
  • Body:
    • Metrics: weight, waist circumference, BMI, waist/height
    • Method: scale + Renpho tape measure
    • Frequency: weekly
  • Other blood:
    • Metrics: hemoglobin, cholesterol, blood pressure, pulse
    • Method: Hemocue 801, Cardiocheck PA, Omron 10
    • Frequency: weekly for blood pressure & pulse, every 2 weeks for hemoglobin & cholesterol


Observations

  • Sleep:
    • My sleep experiment is complete. Analysis will be posted next Saturday. 
    • From looking at my manually recorded data, my Apple Watch is occasionally wildly off on either time awake or time asleep, leading to huge errors in total sleep. For example, for this week, the watch reports an average time asleep of 7.7h, but my manual tracking shows an average time asleep of only 6.8h. A look at the data shows the watch data didn’t catch one day where I had insomnia and didn’t fall asleep until 12:30a (claimed I fell asleep at 9:30p, when I first went into bed) and showed me sleeping until 7:40a another day when I know I was at working starting at 5:30a.   
    • Given these huge discrepancies, I’m going to switch to tracking sleep manually using the final modified protocol from my sleep study. Will specify details in the next post.
  • Blood glucose:
    • Everything looking good. Still keeping an eye on downward trend in coefficient of variation & fasting BG to see if it’s real.
  • Body:
    • Tried to eat more at dinner this week, but still lost 1.6 lb. Looks like the plan to eat more at breakfast will be necessary. 
  • Blood:
    • Off week for hemoglobin and cholesterol.
    • Pulse has been steadily dropping (0.16 bpm/day, R2 = 0.54). This is showing up consistently on the Omron (resting) and Apple Watch (sleeping & awake). The only thing I can think of to cause this is the weight loss. I’ve found several studies reporting a correlation between heart rate and BMI (e.g. here), but they’re mostly in obese patients or population studies. Will try to find some in non-obese people.
    • Blood pressure has been rising the last 3 weeks, but I continue to be skeptical of the measurement device. Looking for ways to verify.

Data:

Blood

Body

Sleep

Methods:

Measurements: See summary section above

Data Processing & Visualization. Data was visualized using Tableau.

Data: here

– QD