Higher fasting blood glucose caused by protein?

[barns]

i am not t2 or pre diabetic but now that i have a keto mojo i noticed my morning bg is 100 to 105. i am testing keytones between .5 and 1. is it possible that i am eating to much protein and the excess is being converted to bg even though i am making keytones? I know it is also possible that the meter just runs a bit high

[Justin_Jordan]

This is a third rail topic. Just to warn you how this is likely to go.

[ctviggen]

It’s a morning glucose sparing effect. If you take your blood sugar at night or toward there, it should be much lower.

[PaulL]

You are experiencing something called the dawn effect, which is a temporary rise in serum glucose in the morning. It probably evolved so that we would wake up ready to fight off any cave bears or sabre-toothed tigers that happened to be loitering in the vicinity.

There is also a phenomenon that occurs at some point after fat-adaptation, and which is called “physiological insulin-resistance” or “glucose-sparing.” It is a state in which the muscles, having adapted to metabolising fatty acids, refuse to take up glucose or ketone bodies, leaving them for the cells that have greater need of them.

In the context of a low-carbohydrate diet, the body uses a small amount of the protein we eat to produce the teaspoon or so of glucose that the body absolutely must have circulating in the bloodstream. This is where the mistaken idea comes from that too much protein is converted into glucose. What actually happens is that amino acids in excess of the amount needed for other purposes get deaminated, and the waste products of that process are either repurposed or excreted. In a high-carbohydrate diet, of course, there is no need for amino acids to be converted into glucose, because the needed glucose is provided directly as the carbohydrate is broken down in the digestive tract.

As long as your HbA_1C remains good, you need not fear either the dawn phenomenon or glucose sparing.