Interesting study on Metformin..

Bluetit1802 said:

@Jim Lahey is someone that talks frequently about having too much glucose in our cells being as bad or worse than too much in the blood stream, and that even when we follow a low carb diet and don't have much in our blood stream, we can still have it lingering in our cells, doing damage, and it takes a lot of effort to get rid of it. This is one reason he doesn't put too much emphasis on finger pricking or A1c tests because they only detect glucose in the blood and nowhere else. I hope he can come along and discuss this. He may find this article very interesting.

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Whilst that’s partially my view, it’s more accurate to say that I don’t believe blood glucose control alone is the sole marker of metabolic health. Particularly if its being achieved through medication. I probably wouldn’t include Metformin in that list of drugs, although I am personally not one of those who buy into the ‘Metformin is a wonder drug’ way of thinking.

Bluetit1802 said:

@Jim Lahey is someone that talks frequently about having too much glucose in our cells being as bad or worse than too much in the blood stream, and that even when we follow a low carb diet and don't have much in our blood stream, we can still have it lingering in our cells, doing damage, and it takes a lot of effort to get rid of it. This is one reason he doesn't put too much emphasis on finger pricking or A1c tests because they only detect glucose in the blood and nowhere else. I hope he can come along and discuss this. He may find this article very interesting.

Click to expand...

I thought that Diabetes was the inability to get the glucose out of our blood stream and into our cells.

Once the cells have their glucose store topped up then any spare glucose is stored as fat.

I'm struggling to see how clearing glucose from the bloodstream is a bad thing - unless the glucose is pushed into tissues which aren't designed to store glucose.

I came off Metformin for about 5 months and my HbA1C went up by far too much (according to a home test). However it wasn't a scientific experiment because I had all sorts of other issues over that period which may have messed up my BG control including chronic back pain and buckets of cocodamol.

I'm back on 3 * 500 mg of Metformin at the moment and about to book an HbA1c (and co-ordinate with a home test) to see if I am back on track.

bulkbiker said:

i.e. it might still work by pushing the increased endogenous glucose into other cells thus explaining the increased rate of disappearance?

Now whether that's a good thing or not remains to be seen..and if that's how metformin works then it may well not the the "oh so safe" medication that we have all been told it is..?

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It's how exogenous insulin mostly works. There's very little of that ever makes it to the liver, so people with Type 1 are essentially using the rest of the body to mop up glucose rather than the liver. Is it bad for us? Open to question.

Very little if any information out there on optimum levels of glucose within cells everything seems to relate to blood glucose.