Comment by analog31
1 day ago
I work in a related area. Non-invasive blood glucose has been a holy grail for analytical science, for decades, and remains a brutally difficult problem.
1 day ago
I work in a related area. Non-invasive blood glucose has been a holy grail for analytical science, for decades, and remains a brutally difficult problem.
Yup. But there's hope that computational techniques can extract the signal from the noise.
If they can it'll be huge. Maybe even Ozempic-huge. There's a theory of weight loss that you can objectively manage your weight by never allowing your blood sugar to go over a certain level.
>There's a theory of weight loss that you can objectively manage your weight by never allowing your blood sugar to go over a certain level.
That doesn't work, even if it were true. You can also manage your weight by never allowing the weight on the scale to go over a certain level.
What do you mean it doesn't work? How do you know?
And no -- your weight on the scale varies drastically with water levels and food in the gut. By up to five pounds. It is useless for figuring out if you can eat another bite of rice.
While glucose levels are literally minute-by-minute. They're fine-grained enough to actually tell you when to eat more and when to not.
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Indeed, there's always a hope that more advanced computation will crack this nut in the future. That's been a constant for a quarter century too.
Nonsense. Tell this to humans that die when their blood glucose is insanely high (500mg/dl), go into DKA and they are SKINNY!!! You’re suggesting 20 calories can make you obese because it raises blood glucose lol! 3-5 grams (12-20 calories) of a mild-glycemic index carbohydrate can send your blood glucose well above 120mg/dl and you would not gain weight because of an extra 12-20 calories. Additionally, 1,200 calories from fat (133 grams of fat) will not spike your blood glucose until 5-12 hours later and you you can gain weight, but that signal is lost because the rise in blood glucose happens 1-3 meals, or even the next day after eating the high fat meal. Blood glucose is VERY important but not predictive of weight. Diet, (the amount and macro composition of calories) is predictive of weight and exercise is predictive of weight. The are other factors, but those are the main predictors.
> Tell this to humans that die when their blood glucose is insanely high (500mg/dl), go into DKA and they are SKINNY!!!
We're not talking about people with underlying health conditions. Exceptions don't invalidate a general principle.
> You’re suggesting 20 calories can make you obese because it raises blood glucose lol!
Nothing "lol" about it. An extra 20 calories, 20 times a day, every day for months and years, above your caloric needs, is yes quite likely to make you obese. How else do you think most people get obese?
> fat... will not spike your blood glucose until 5-12 hours later
And you can become aware of those patterns. You will know, for example, not to eat anything else during that window. Or learn to eat fat in gradual amounts, rather than large amounts in a single sitting.
> Blood glucose is VERY important but not predictive of weight.
You seem quite confident about that. You're also quite possibly wrong. The underlying logic is pretty sound: we gain weight when our blood sugar goes up and therefore our insulin goes up to remove the sugar from the bloodstream and, eventually, store it as fat.
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