The Personalized Diet by Eran Segal

Author:Eran Segal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

CHAPTER 6

Blood Sugar: Your Ultimate Food Feedback Response

Shay is an airline pilot with a regular flight schedule, and for years, he has followed the same daily routine. At the same time every day, he piloted a flight that went to the same place and then returned home that same day. The complete trip took several hours, so he always took a snack with him. He would eat the same snack (a sandwich) after the flight to the destination—but every time on the return flight, he always felt tired. This disturbed him, of course, because airline pilots must be alert and being fatigued made staying vigilant more difficult. He couldn’t understand why he felt fatigued, because he was getting enough sleep and exercised regularly. He hoped he wasn’t developing some sort of illness. Then he entered our study.

When Shay began tracking his blood sugar as part of our study, he discovered something surprising—every time he ate bread, he experienced an extreme blood sugar spike. Bread does not have this effect on everyone. By now we also know (as we explained in Chapter 1) that even different types of bread may have different responses in different individuals. Some people eat bread, or a specific type of bread, and have only a mild blood sugar rise. Others get big spikes, and Shay was one of the latter, so it seemed a likely culprit for his afternoon fatigue. Shay decided to try switching his sandwich for a standard airplane meal, which usually contained starchy food, other than bread, like rice or pasta. After he made the switch in what he ate, his afternoon fatigue completely disappeared.

Could something as simple as exchanging bread for pasta or rice have such a dramatic effect on afternoon fatigue? A more precise question would be: Could something as simple as switching out bread for pasta or rice really have such a dramatic effect on blood sugar levels? The answer, of course, is yes.

Blood sugar is an important piece of the personal nutrition puzzle because it impacts your energy and fatigue levels (as was the case with Shay), but blood sugar instability (big highs, significant lows) can also negatively impact many aspects of your health. But what exactly is blood sugar, and why does it matter so much? Why do we keep talking about it, and why have we made it such a focus of our research? Here’s what you need to know.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.