Live experiment part 4: pure erythritol

(Brian) #41

It would also be interesting to compare responses to things not normally associated with sweets. For instance, if you drink 12 ounces of plain ol’ water, would you get a response? If you eat one pat of butter, would you get a response? If you eat one ounce of cheese, would you get a response? And if so, how would those compare to our 6g of erythritol?

I’ve always been told that eating anything at all will give at least a small insulin response. So to me, the level of response needs a context. You get “x” response when ingesting 6g of erythritol, compared to what?

A molehill is huge from the ant’s perspective. However, from the perspective of a buffalo, it’s likely to be of so little consequence as to be unnoticed.

(Central Florida Bob ) #42

To add another complication, how do you know that in the experimental period your blood sugar isn’t varying a few percent on its own? Built in to the test, you’re assuming that without the erythritol challenge, your own blood sugar wouldn’t vary 0.1 over that 30/60/90 minutes. Does it? There has been talk about consistency of the meter, what about your consistency?

Were you doing anything else or just sitting waiting for the next timer to go off? I’ve never run the test on myself, but I think if between tests you did different things and then went and stuck yourself, your blood sugar might vary with what you were doing.

I come from electronics manufacturing, a world where test equipment is often accurate to 1%, so measuring my body drives me nuts. Even with test equipment accurate to 1%, we’d do experiments (Gage R&R) on processes to ensure we really could measure the things we needed to measure to that accuracy.

At one time or another, I’ve had four different BG meters, and I’m not even diabetic. I see in the article @mtncntrykid posted that “Sanofi studies show most people use 4 meters on average”. My wife volunteers in a free medical clinic and says “I see them hand out meters like candy and I’ve never seen the first word about calibration or accuracy”. I’ll stop using one if it seems it’s off 15%.