My Blood Values From Diet And Other Activities
Project Infobox 
| |
|---|---|
| Self researcher(s) | Benjamin Best |
| Related tools | Abbot Precision Xtra, Abbott FreeStyle Lite, Dexcom G5, CardioChek Plus |
| Related topics | Food tracking, Blood glucose tracking, Cholesterol, Activity tracking |
Builds on project(s) |
|
| Has inspired | Projects (0) |
| Show and Tell Talk Infobox | |
|---|---|
| Featured image | 
|
| Date | 2018/09/23 |
| Event name | 2018 QS Global Conference |
| Slides | My-blood-values-from-diet-and-other-activities.pdf |
|
This content was automatically imported. See here how to improve it if any information is missing or out outdated. |
My Blood Values From Diet And Other Activities is a Show & Tell talk by Benjamin Best that has been imported from the Quantified Self Show & Tell library.The talk was given on 2018/09/23 and is about Food tracking, Blood glucose tracking, Cholesterol, and Activity tracking.
Description[edit | edit source]
A description of this project as introduced by Quantified Self follows:
Ben Best measured his blood glucose, ketones, triglycerides, and cholesterol in response to a wide variety of foods and other activities. He'll show how his analysis changed his dietary choices. 4
Video and transcript[edit | edit source]
A transcript of this talk is below:
My main goal is to keep my blood glucose below 100 after eating a meal. I also want my triglycerides to be low after a meal, but triglycerides raise ketones and I want my ketones to be high.
I joined the Quantified Self blood testers group in which there was an emphasis on cholesterol and I’m not that too interested in cholesterol, but I experimented with it. These are what most of my graphs look like. The green line shows the glucose. That’s most important to me, and then the orange line is the triglycerides and the blue line and that’s quantified on the left-hand axis and the ketones are quantified on the right-hand axis in blue. I also use the same colors for cholesterol, HDL, LDL and remnant cholesterol. Remnant cholesterol is all the cholesterol that isn’t HDL or LDL. And this shows I’m showing the effect of about 10 hours by the way and I did see any effect after eating these eggs of my cholesterol. Some people get their blood cholesterol go up after eating cholesterol foods. I’m not one of them. Those are hyper-responders. I’m not a hyper responder. Saturated fat makes cholesterol go up, but I didn’t see much effect with that either. I think I need to eat it on an ongoing basis. Exercise. The first 45 minutes of my exercise regimen is aerobic exercise and I didn’t see much decline there. I also have a continuous glucose monitor, and I only saw a significant decline in my glucose when doing aerobic exercise. I’m not sure why there’s a discrepancy there. Nearly two hours of a warm bath, I didn’t see much change in my blood values either, and once again, my continuous glucose monitor indicates my glucose goes up. In general, glucose tends to go up as a result of inactivity and goes down as a result of activity. I think interrupting my bath every 10 to 15 minutes to measure my blood values might have affected the result. Now, deep tissue massage surprisingly caused my triglycerides to go up. In contrast the stretching massage and I think possibly the oils that were being absorbed in my skin and raising my triglycerides. I did a week long water fast and here again are glucose, triglycerides and ketones, and the glucose, the green line goes down significantly the longer the fast and the ketones, the blue line goes up significantly the longer the fast. And after four or five days of fasting what typically happens is that the liver starts pumping out more triglycerides to compensate for the low dietary fat, and as a result of this, my LDL cholesterol surprisingly, not surprisingly went up and also my remnant cholesterol went up. Now, I wanted to see the effects of restful sleep, but I also noticed that my blood pressure tends to be high in the morning probably due to that cholesterol – I mean the cortisol, so cortisol raises the triglycerides even although the glucose went down. Carbohydrates. If I ingest 70 grams of glucose, my glucose is very high after between one and two hours and then drops very low after four hours down to 50. If I eat white bread, for a whole six hours my glucose is elevated, and wheat isn’t that much better in that regard. Pumpernickel rye it goes way up after an hour, but after four hours the glucose is way down, the green line again. Rolled oats and oat bran aren’t much better than bread, and I found some noodles that are all fiber and did not raise my blood glucose at all and combined that with tomato paste and made a pretty good meal. Bagels, I found some bagels that had no starch. They did not raise my blood glucose at all. And they look like bread, taste like bread and made with coconut flour. It’s a miracle. So avocado, after six hours my triglycerides go way up and then following that the ketones go up and my glucose is not affected at all. A similar effect with butter, but with olive oil it doesn’t affect my glucose. But after 12 hours both my ketones and triglycerides were quite elevated. Fish oil doesn’t affect my glucose much. Sesame seeds, if I initially have high glucose it raises my ketones a little bit. But if the glucose is low there’s quite a substantial rise. If you look at the right-hand axis there, you’ll see what a difference there is between the initially high glucose and low glucose in terms of the ketones I get. I also ingested 200 grams of medium chain triglyceride oil which had a wonderful effect. My triglycerides went right down, my glucose was way down, and my ketones went way up. And I had stomach aches and headaches for hours after that. But if I cut that down to 80 grams and mix it with food it’s not so bad, and I can get a good meal out of it and it doesn’t raise my glucose with sprouts and oil. Also, I like free cream cheese. V8 juice unfortunately raises my glucose more that soymilk and flax milk. Berries, I like eating berries for the phytochemicals, but I get a tremendous rise in blood glucose after an hour it does go down quickly after that. But strawberries affect isn’t so great, probably with the greater water content. And cranberries have a lot of phytochemicals and don’t raise the glucose too much.
So most of the experiments haven’t changed my lifestyle. It was interesting, but it hasn’t changed anything that I do very much, other than my diet which has changed radically, and I described all these things. So if anybody has any questions I’ll answer them.
About the presenter[edit | edit source]
Benjamin Best gave this talk.