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It’s been a while since I have used a Continuous glucose monitor (CGM). I got an opportunity to try Nutrisense for 14 days.
I wanted to experiment with Nutrisense to investigate the effects of a home walking treadmill on glucose levels with the same breakfast.
Here is a link to Nutrisense health quiz to see if its for you (Use code BIOHACKER25 to get 25$ off from your order).
As seen in my Garmin statistics, I walk a lot compared to other Garmin users:
I walk normally one to three hours on the treadmill, especially when I’m working.
As walking is an integral part of my daily life, it’s interesting to investigate its effects on glucose levels after breakfast.
I ate the following breakfast for six days:
Nutrisense app provides multiple different metrics that I will compare in the experiment:
Glucose, peak, exposure, stability, and recovery score give an understandable number from the raw data. The positive effects of walking after the meal should be visible in these numbers, as seen in many scientific studies [1]
Nutrisense also provides raw data: the actual glucose peak number, AUC being the area under the curve, delta measuring the glucose jump, and 2-hour delta comparing the 2-hour value after meal to the pre-meal value.
The results
Walking 1 hour after the breakfast produced almost perfect results:
It was surprising to see that 30-minute walk recovery scores were far from perfect:
Even though I’m eating the same breakfast, it’s important to realize that this experiment is not done in the laboratory, so other factors affect the result.
One powerful factor is stress. It is known to affect glucose levels negatively [2][3].
My Garmin watch revealed interesting stress data from the 30-minute walk day with the worst scores:
What happens if I sit 2 hours after breakfast?
The highest peak was achieved with this, glucose level reaching 144 mg/dL on the second try. Still, recovery was better compared to a 30-minute walk.
Based on my own data from previous CGM experiments, I might have better mood, energy, and sleep when there’s less variability in my glucose levels. There are some scientific studies supporting this, but I would like to see more studies (also on healthy individuals).
I like that with the Nutrisense app it is possible to log your subjective feelings:
I like to see this feature also in other apps. For example, monitoring your subjective sleep score vs. Oura ring sleep score would be interesting. Overall, I’m a big proponent of combining objective and subjective data.
Coffee and glucose levels
I started to drink coffee at the beginning of this year for the first time in my life. Whenever there are drastic changes in diet, it’s interesting to see the effects of CGM.
One morning I only drank coffee (and I sat for 2 hours), and this was the result:
Surprisingly, coffee with oats and soy milk increases glucose peak to 131 mg/dL. Most likely, this is because of oat milk, which has a high glycemic index [4]. I’m thinking of switching from oat milk to almond.
Key learnings
1. 1 hour walk after eating provides stable glucose metrics
2. Stress has a significant impact on glucose levels
3. With Nutrisense, it’s possible to combine subjective metrics with glucose statistics
4. I will switch from oat milk to almond milk because of the high glycemic index, which was evident in the glucose graph
Here is a link to Nutrisense health quiz to see if its for you (Use code BIOHACKER25 to get 25$ off from your order).