Type 1 What levels do non-diabetics sugar spikes reach?

Bluetit1802

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Type of diabetes
Treatment type
Diet only
I am not a healthcare professional and this is not medical advice. Furthermore, I do not have much personal experience with diabetes. I present this reply in hopes that it is useful, but without any warranty of fitness for purpose. You use the information contained herein at your own (likely minor, if you know what you are doing) peril.

Ideally, for maximum emotional stability and complication prevention, you wouldn't be ticking up over 5.6 mM, though many people have said that someone without DM1 wouldn't be diagnosed with impaired glucose tolerance until they were showing postmeals over 7.8 mM, which I think is absurd (a blood glucose that high is not a good experience).

Since you're looking for what's normal, I think I'm a good reference point, because I don't have DM of either type. However, as you'll read later, I do appear to have impaired glucose tolerance, so maybe I'm not what you'd call 'normal', although I eat a diet that makes logical sense for IGT so I do run numbers I consider normal.

I've seen fasting glucoses for myself all the way from 3.7 mM to 5.8 mM, even into the low 7s during an extended fast. Generally, though, 12 hours p.c. the number usually has a 4 in front of it. Only a 5.x if my sleep is really whack. High 5s are generally a result of undereating and poor sleep together (kinda ironic but simultaneously sensible how higher BGs would be from undereating).

FreeStyle Libre is extraordinarily inaccurate for me, though I did sort of put it in the wrong place (my left tit, to be precise), and if I had DM1 I would not use Libre for treatment decisions, preferring instead to rely on a fingerstick test.

If I eat a 75g-carb bowl of rice, I'll tick up all the way to 8.5 mM, and that sort of feels like the end of the world for me (think: all the water you drink just cannot stick to you). So, I really don't eat much in the way of glucose, be it bread, rice, oats, potatoes, sweet potatoes or carrots. In fact, I don't eat almost anything in the way of plant-derived food, mostly because of information I'm privy to about antinutrients (including oxalic acid and phytic acid).

When I eat my usual diet of various guises of red meat, eggs and dairy, the glucagon ramp that comes from the protein in that is hidden by an insulin ramp. You won't have this happen because you have DM1. Instead you will see your blood sugar come up from gluconeogenesis. You may need to get your pharmacy to give you "soluble" (the older rapid-acting insulin, that superseded beef/pork but preceded the modern 'logues) if you decide you want to eat a diet akin to mine (I would not do this without consulting your healthcare professional; I'm just a layperson who has never had a diagnosis of diabetes but is pretty sure she's been in the cascade that would lead to DM2 if left unchecked).

I've heard second-hand anecdotes that some people who live with DM1 have to split-dose their basal insulin analogue to achieve 24 hour coverage, and that this may be true even with degludec, which is touted as lasting 42 hours. Again; ask your healthcare professional how to do this safely if that's what you want to do.

If you're asking about my 1h postprandial numbers, those run in the same range as my fasting numbers unless I just ate a ton of starch or swigged a glass of milk. 3.7-5.8, usually has a 4 in front of it. If I eat rice, as I said, I might tick up to 8.5 within the ensuing 2-3 hours. I recently tested myself on a similar quantity of oat porridge (diluted with yoghurt, milk and cream, so that might be why) and strangely did not test above 6.3 once, but it was bouncing between 5s and that for upwards of two hours.

That is interesting. Those of us Type 2s on this forum that eat a very low carb diet, or keto, mostly see numbers similar to your lower levels.

The only problem I can see with your levels, as a non-diabetic, is you don't eat a normal western diet. You eat mostly animal products, which are by their nature not carby. When you eat something carby, your levels increase. So when we are searching for information on what a normal non-diabetic might spike to, we can perhaps use your higher levels as an example rather than your lower ones.
 

Ellenor2000

Well-Known Member
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91
Hey I'm curious. You said when you eat rice you get up to 8.5mmol
Is that at 1h or 2h or later?
I was about the same at 1h with rice and sometimes couldn't back under 6.7 by the 2 mark so I've stopped eating it.
What made you start checking your own bg levels? It's a good idea and I think it should become mainstream so people can stop being in denial about how their food choices are affecting them.

Well, a sleep deprived impulse purchase is what ultimately tipped me over the edge into SMBG and SMISFG.

I actually wrote about it on a no-longer-updated text file on my Web site. I think it was around 130 minutes after that I was showing 8.5mM/~153mg/dL (at 45 minutes in I hit 8.0/144, and ended up bouncing around between 7.4 and 8.5), at which point I went on a bike ride, got it down to 4.9 (a few weeks down the line, a high caused by fasting got worse from cycling), went up to the 5s again, and after that bounced between high 3s and low 5s.

Libre taught me that drinking coffee makes my ISF glucose go low, and the symptoms (which I initially thought were just caffeine jitters, but an insulin-agenetic friend of mine told me it sounded to him like a hypo) correlated so I have to assume that my blood glucose also went low. So now I've quit coffee and will only be using tea and chocolate, which have much milder impacts on my glucose metabolism, perhaps owing to a lower caffeine content.