I'm not prediabetic but I have glucose spikes which my GP says it's nevertheless good to minimise. In the past I've used the Zoe app to predict the effects of a meal. What this told me is that most foods except fatty foods eg nuts, oils, cheese will give spikes. When I include those kinds of things it predicts low/no spikes and when I've two or three times checked this with a continuous monitor, those predictions were correct.
Now alas Zoe has been "improved" and the new app no longer gives glucose predictions for meals. So I'm trying Logi. This seems to give different results and glaecemic load scores no longer improve if I add nuts or olive oil to a meal. I don't know if Zoe was calculating "glaecemic load" as such, but Logi is. [I asked Zoe but god bless'em, they won't tell me.]
I can get another continuous monitor and calibrate the Logi predictions, but I'd like to avoid that if I can. And in any case I'd like to know if others have the same experience, and if this makes sense and there's any scientific basis to it.
Many thanks
Hi and welcome. The term "spike" is often misused. Properly it means an unexpected and very high (I mean 14s, 15s etc) and fast rise in BG. A rise in BG after eating carbohydrate is completely normal and to be expected, and calling a normal rise a spike can therefore be misleading. Your GP may not understand this the same way, and may not be all that clued up about what normal looks like. It also depends why you're monitoring your BG and what you're trying to achieve by doing that.
The short answer is that all digested carbs and sugar end up as glucose. This doesn't happen with fats and proteins. In any event you are not diabetic, so you can expect to have a normal insulin first- and second-level response to ingested carb. That should deal with the incoming glucose and return your overall BG to somewhere at or close to where it was before you ate. Incidentally, your liver and kidneys (to a lesser extent) are making glucose all the time themselves, so it's not just the glucose from the food that needs to be considered. Your body will make all the glucose you need itself, carb from food is inessential.
This bit of research below was run because nobody had a clear picture of what new generation (2019) CGMs would show for a normal non-diabetic population. In other words, you can't assess what a diabetic response looks like if you have no idea what a non-diabetic response is.
Use of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) is increasing for insulin-requiring patients with diabetes. Although data on glycemic profiles of healthy, nondiabetic individuals exist for older sensors, assessment of glycemic metrics with new-generation ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
You'll see that non-diabetic people have rises in BG after eating carb, and the more carb, the higher the rise. They also return to baseline fairly predictably, which is often the problem for those with T2. BG goes up and stays up. As you'll have seen yourself from using a CGM, BG varies constantly across the day and in response to many stimuli, not only food. BG is not "stable" - it's dynamic and it's designed to be that way.
Personally as a T2 I strictly limit the amount of carb I take in to around 20g/day. That means I expect to see values around 4.5-5.5 mmol/l before eating, and 5.0-6.0 afterwards. I fuel mainly from ketones rather than glucose. I do this because I've been symptom-free for six and a half years and really don't want those symptoms back. These days, because I'm much less insulin resistant, even doubling the amount of daily carb for one meal as a one-off will probably not take me much above 7.5. But that's not something I make a habit of, given that my system broke once already.
