Stevia insulin spike?

(Jill Cherni) #1

To anyone following Dr Cywes and his great videos… He says if you wear a CGM, which he does, stevia will spike your insulin but he never said how much that’s I’ve heard. I enjoy a Zevia ( stevia soda) mostly everyday and wondered if anyone actually had seen this and how much does it spike? I have lost 11 of my 20 lbs of my goal and will readjust my little “bridge” as he calls it, if I have to. Feeling awesome, finally.

(Jane) #2

First of all… the CGM is measuring glucose which is an indirect method of determining insulin. Too bad we can’t measure insulin yet but I bet some really smart people are working on it!

Also… everyone reacts differently to zero cal sweeteners. There is a video of two people, a man and a woman, testing a different sweetener every day. While some they had very similar results with - others were quite different. The same sweetener had no effect on one but dropped the blood glucose on the other - indicating an insulin release.

(Jill Cherni) #3

I guess I’ll keep doing what I’m doing since it seems to be working then. Weird how that works with people reacting completely different. Maybe varying degrees of insulin resistance. Thank you for your thoughts.

#4

Given that a CGM can’t measure insulin does he ever show how much his sugar is dropping? Seems pretty unlikely that Stevia is doing that. Keep in mind many have a VERY loose definition of what constitutes a “spike”. If you’re having no issues with it I’d ignore it.

(Nicolas) #5

My own experience, I measured sweetened coffee with stevia (Organic) no spike in blood glucose(Glucose did not went up, it went down by a 2 or 3 points mg/dl 1 hour after), I also checked Coke Zero (Aspartame) the same.

But each body is different I presume, the thing is,for what I understand Stevia, Aspartame are 0 in the Glycemic Index.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #6

Well, it will spike someone’s insulin, but not necessarily yours. It would appear that all non-sugar sweeteners spike the insulin of some percentage of the population, but it’s a different group of people that it happens to for each sweetener. There is no way to measure insulin at home, and furthermore, your insulin spike, if any, would depend on the degree of your insulin resistance, so there is no way to predict just how much stevia will spike your insulin, assuming that it does so at all.

The only way to determine whether you have an insulin spike is by repeatedly testing your glucose just before you eat the sweetener (for a baseline) and then rigourously testing again every half hour for several hours. (It goes without saying that you cannot perform this test just after a meal or consume anything but the sweetener until the test is completed.) If there is a significant drop in your glucose, you can probably infer that it was the result of an insulin spike.

P.S.—The effect of non-sugar sweeteners on insulin has not been studied, so far as I know. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires test data from the manufacturer showing that a non-sugar sweetener does not affect blood glucose, before that sweetener may be sold in the U.S., but the FDA doesn’t care about blood insulin, so there is no incentive to test that.

(Joey) #7

Below is a link (hopefully) to my own personal n=1 experience with stevia and subsequent blood glucose testing.

In short: Ingesting a larger-than-typical dose of stevia had no (lowering) effect on my blood sugar – through which one can infer it had no measurable insulin (spiking) effect.
YMMV…

(Hyperbole- best thing in the universe!) #8

This is what indicated there may be an insulin response. You aren’t taking in glucose, so blood levels won’t rise. But some people’s body seem to think any sweet tasting thing has sugar so it releases insulin to deal with it. So lower glucose readings indirectly indicate an insulin response to the stevia. Not sure if 2 or 3 points indicate anything though. But a significant decrease would be informative.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #9

A variation of 2 or 3 points is likely to be within the margin of error of the metre. One would have to check the manual for the particular metre to discover the degree of accuracy. If two readings are within each other’s margin of error, then they are essentially the same reading.

So, for example, if the margin of error is 20%, say, then a reading of 100 would mean that the actual level is somewhere between 80 and 120. A measure of 90 could mean anything between 72 and 108. Given the large overlap between the two ranges, it is likely that the two readings represent the same actual level. A smaller margin of error means that readings that are close but different stand a better chance of measuring an actual difference.

(Hyperbole- best thing in the universe!) #10

Yeah, I wasn’t sure on the amounts because I don’t test, and then psyched myself out thinking what if it is a European measurement ant they measure differently oh no!

But the general idea that lowered blood glucose can be an indication of raised insulin Is what I was going for.