Glucose experiment

(John) #1

It is my understanding that almost any cell in the human body can use glucose for energy. So it has an appropriate insulin response to the amount in your blood.

That then leads me to the hypothesis that fructose and artificial sweeteners generate an insulin response that reduces your blood glucose which then makes you crave sweet food to replenish it.

This leads to my n=1 (maybe n=2) of swapping all sweeteners (artificial, sucrose or fructose) with pure glucose.

I have been lazy keto for 11 months and do not have a sweet tooth. My wife is not keto at all and does have a sweet tooth. So I think it will be interesting to see the results of satiety/binging in both of us as we are starting from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Other than changing the type of sweetener I will continue to IF. 20/4 Monday-Friday and eat freely but still lazy keto on weekends. This should isolate the results as much as possible for me.

My starting point is:

180cm (5 foot 11 inches)
85.2KG (188lb)
87cm (34inch) pants fit comfortably

I don’t have blood sugar, ketones or HbA1c so I am most interested in my pants getting looser. :slight_smile:

I will do this for 3 months and report my weight and pant size monthly.

(Andrew) #2

Yawn

In 20 yrs you might have T2D. Or not. Fructose isn’t bad enough to make a difference in 3 months. If you are pounding glucose I’m sure you’ll be fatter in 3 months.

Avoiding fuctose might be great but the rest of is will be dead before you learn anything.

(Kenneth Coleman) #3

This is thinking out of the box for sure. I would suspect if you have no belly fat or skin tags (insulin resistance) you will probably be fine. Without measuring any results in three months would be vague. If I remember correctly straight glucose is less sweet, would it stop the sweets cravings? I’m not sure I understand though. Are you expecting to lose or gain a pants size?

(Sammy J Shuford) #4

There is such a thing as fructose intolerance. I have been using large amounts of MIO, which has Sucrose, 1/2 glucose and 1/2 fructose

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #5

The glucose, of course, has the usual effect of any glucose on the body, but the fructose has to be dealt with in the liver. If the quantity is too high or arrives too fast for the liver to deal with (and the same metabolic pathway also has to deal with alcohol and branched-chain amino acids), then we get fatty liver disease, which is also known as Insulin-resistance of the liver.

Fortunately, the accumulated liver fat gets cleared pretty quickly, once we stop overwhelming the pathway involved.

(Bob M) #6

It’d be nice to put numbers to this. For instance, while I normally avoid fruit, I ate some cherries this year. How many cherries can I eat before I overwhelm the liver? Or is it even possible to overwhelm the liver with most fruit? (Certainly, sugar can do it, but it’s very easy to eat a lot of sugar; it’s harder to eat a lot of fruit. At least for me.)

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #7

Dr. Lustig says that whole fruit is not going to overwhelm your liver. It’s very easy to overwhelm your liver with the fructose in a glass of apple juice, but you’d never be able to stomach the equivalent number of apples. And the fibre slows the absorption of the fructose down to a rate the liver can safely handle. And so forth for other fruits. Fruit smoothies, he says, are just as bad as juice, because the fibre gets mechanically destroyed in the blending process.

#8

I do eat fruit in the summer time. I won’t elaborate on why because I don’t want to trigger anyone. I have done this all the years on Keto, and while it pauses any weight loss, it hasn’t upset anything. I kind of follow the diet my ancestors lived on, since I know what it was, and it is basically Keto. The only thing that is not Keto about it is the seasonal fruit. They are in season for a short time though, and so far I do well this way.

(Chuck) #9

I eat fruit pretty much year round as long as I can get it fresh or flash frozen. I have lost weight while eating my fruit, but I must admit I eat a very moderate amount. I also make my smoothies at time with fresh fruit or flash frozen fruit and have done so since last September and I have lost almost 50 pounds so far, have lost 12 inches from my waist.

#10

I eat berries out of season, but that’s it. My first year on Keto I ate a lot of fruit and lost anyway. That changed over time.

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #11

Even a hard line carnivore like Ken Berry eats an apple off the tree … when in season

(Bob M) #12

I think if you want to eat fruit, it should be eaten in season. Which for real fruits where I live is very short.

(Chuck) #13

I get flash frozen berries for my smoothies year round. And if I can find sliced flash frozen peaches, I will eat them.

(Bob M) #14

I’m just not sure you should be doing that. If it doesn’t hurt, then it’s okay. But for many of us (I’m 99.8% European according to genetics) shouldn’t be eating fruit all year. It’s not natural.

(Chuck) #15

I grew up on the farm when we didn’t have the capacity to freeze our over abundance, we pickled it, preserved it, we even preserved meat with salt. Believe me eating flash frozen fruit is a lot better than eating preserved fruit that contains lots of sugar or salt. But like I continuously say it is what works for the individual person, and I am someone that believes that.

(Chuck) #16

I have come to the realization that I have to figure it for myself. If I listened to everyone and everything I would end up not having anything left to eat. So I experience and learn from my mistakes and victories.

(Jenna Ericson) #17

I’m guessing this n=1 didn’t go so well?