In this piece, I share some background information and the lessons I learned as a cyborg over the past month (using a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) - a medical device typically used by diabetics). I did this using a startup called Levels that sent me a set of continuous glucose monitors.
Although Levels currently has a 45,000+ person waitlist, the company has created a link for me to share with individuals interested in getting early access and skipping the waitlist: https://levels.link/MARCO
Background Information
You may have heard of the term "glycemic index" associated with specific foods you eat and drink. The glycemic index is intended to indicate how much a given food will impact the blood glucose (sugar) levels of an average human (scale of 0-100). The lower the glycemic index of a given food, the less that food should impact your blood glucose levels. Corn has a glycemic index of 65. White rice is 73. Soybeans are 16.
If you have an interest in living a life with maximum lifespan and healthspan (quality of life), it is in your interest to minimize extreme spikes in your blood glucose levels.
Blood glucose spikes cause many issues over time:
Short term issues include brain fog and energy swings - afternoon “crashes” in energy tend to be due to blood sugar spikes
Long term issues include metabolic disease, type II diabetes, low energy, obesity, (and the list goes on...). If you would like to learn more, I recommend you check out Dr. Jason Fung’s work (I like his book The Obesity Code)
The effects of regular blood sugar spikes compound over the course of a lifetime. Therefore, my view is that finding a closed-feedback-loop system to self-experiment and build excellent habits to minimize unnecessary blood sugar spikes early in life will pay compounding dividends over the coming decades.
Why wear a CGM?
Averages are dangerous to draw inference from. Corn and white rice may have completely different impacts on the blood sugar levels of two metabolically healthy individuals (this was the case for me, where corn spikes my blood glucose like bananas and white rice spikes my blood glucose less than brown rice).
My goal in spending a month as a cyborg was to understand my personal glycemic index as well as to identify "trigger foods" (that spike blood glucose - to be avoided) and other tactics and tricks around lifestyle and diet to optimize my long term metabolic health.
So, after a month as a human cyborg, what did I learn?
Lessons Learned: Diet
The order in which I eat the exact same foods makes a big difference in terms of the impact that the foods have on my blood glucose levels
I found my optimal meal ordering to be: Vinegar + Fiber + Fat (vinegar + olive oil over steamed vegetables), Protein (fish/meat), Carbohydrate (rice/wheat/sweet potato/legume)
I found my least-optimal meal ordering to be the exact opposite: Carbohydrate, Protein, Vinegar + Fiber + Fat
The difference in blood glucose spike between these two orderings is over 30 mg/dL
Corn and non-fermented wheat are big trigger foods for me (note: I do not consume sugar or alcohol so I did not test the impact of those foods). I also found that refined wheat flour hits me pretty hard even if it is fermented but I still plan to treat myself to a croissant once a month
Drinking a large amount of water with a meal increases the insulin spike of the meal
I see the same spike in glucose from both white and brown rice
Neurohacker Collective's Qualia Mind (caffeine-free) Supplement drops my fasting glucose 10 mg/dL for 2 days after each use. I am still in the early days of developing a view on whether I will use this supplement longer-term but seeing the positive blood glucose impact was extremely interesting to me
Coffee (black & straight espresso) - my morning beverage of choice 60 minutes after waking, has no negative impact on my blood glucose
Lessons Learned: Lifestyle
Missing 90 minutes of sleep ( relative to a 7-hour baseline)for just one night causes my fasting glucose levels to become elevated for 2-3 days (by around 10mg/dL) and impairs my ability to bring glucose levels back down quickly following a meal (my glucose will tend to stay elevated for over 2 hours rather than drop back to baseline within a single hour)
Powerlifting-style exercise (where a lot of glucose is put to work via my muscle mass) allows me to "cheat" so that I can eat a carbohydrate-heavy meal (like pizza) and have a glucose spike comparable to a meal of salmon and steamed broccoli. The mechanism here is that the glucose from the meal is quickly deposited into my skeletal muscle mass rather than circulating around my bloodstream. I don't see this effect if I wait more than ~45 minutes after I finish lifting weights to eat
Taking a 10 minute light walk following a meal materially reduces the glucose spike of the meal
A meal consumed in a fasted state spikes my glucose less than the same meal consumed shortly after my glucose has recovered from a previous meal's spike