Post prandial Spike after Meal

[LoveCarbs888]

Hello,

Question - what is an acceptable spike range for a healthy person? Is a spike beyond 140 or 180 or 200 considered problematic? I'm talking about the spike specifically, i.e. the highest before it drops. Not so much about the level after 2 hours.
I've noticed that my spikes are very high after having carbs, but they drop to below 140 after 2 hours though. Is this prediabetes territory? Appreciare, it can vary from individual to individual, but would like to get some views nonetheless.

Thanks -

 

[KennyA]

Hi and welcome. You're using mg/dl values, which are not used much in the UK, so to translate:

140 mg/dl = 7.8 mmol/l
180 = 10
200 = 11.1

I don't like using the term "spike" in relation to a normal and expected rise in blood glucose after eating carbs. My favourite personal example is that a small milky coffee will take me from 5.2 to 9.6 after 40 minutes, and back to 5.2 after an hour. That's not a spike, it's only to be expected from the lactose in the milk. It's why the +2 hour reading is most important, as it shows you how well your system works at clearing excess glucose, which is key information.

It's not really possible to give you a straight answer. It depends on you, and on what you ate, and probably on several other factors as well. If you ate a very large amount of carb/sugar, you'd expect to see a commensurate rise in blood glucose. If you're clearing that by the two hour point, it shows that your insulin response system at present is currently handling that sort of carb load.

The issue for those of us with this sort of metabolic problem is that at one point we all could handle the carb load. I followed the still-current high carb "healthy" eating advice and developed T2, probably from overloading my system and developing insulin resistance. Removing the carb load through my present way of eating has corrected that, at the time of writing.

It might be useful to look at daily CGM graphs from non-diabetic people. BG levels rise and fall in response to food and all sorts of things. You'll find lots on the internet, and there's a research paper here which is informative.

Continuous Glucose Profiles in Healthy Subjects under Everyday Life Conditions and after Different Meals - PMC

This study investigated continuous glucose profiles in nondiabetic subjects. Continuous interstitial glucose measurement was performed under everyday life conditions (2 days) and after ingestion of four meals with standardized carbohydrate content ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov