Bad sleep and blood sugar spikes

What happened to my blood sugar levels with bad night of sleep? (Veristable experiment)

The importance of quality sleep has been widely discussed. We all know the difference in energy levels when we are well-rested versus a bad night of sleep. 

However, from an individual’s perspective, it has been hard to quantify bad sleep based on biomarkers. How does a bad night of sleep affect your internal system? Thanks to continuous glucose monitors, it’s now possible!

I want to investigate this, first from scientific literature and then from my own results.

Ps. You can use my referral link to get 30 dollars off from your first Veri sensor order or use code VSM-ILMOST 

1. What science says about poor sleep and blood sugar?

Famous (and respected) physician Peter Attia said in one podcast that sleeping four hours a night instead of eight could turn a normal person prediabetic in two weeks. 

This is a scary statement, especially if you have a newborn baby or some other life factors affect your sleep. Did Peter Attia exaggerate, or is this really the case?

The body’s metabolic state is reformed in sleep: balancing insulin and circulating glucose. This works well when we get enough sleep.  Many epidemiological studies have shown that type 2 diabetes is found at a much higher rate in groups that sleep less than six hours a night (lifestyle factors taken into consideration [1] [2] [3].

What about healthy adults sleeping less than six hours a night? One interesting study let participants sleep only 4 hours a night for 6 days [4]. Findings were clear:

Obviously, there are also genetic factors like I have discussed in my previous DNA testing review. For me, there was an increased risk for type 2 diabetes based on my genes.

In conclusion, it seems that Peter Attia was on the point, multiple studies have shown a direct link between poor sleep and glucose intolerance.

What about my personal data?

2. My experiment with poor sleep and blood sugar spikes

Even though I’m a self-experimenter, I’m not going to sleep willingly 4 hours a night just for testing purposes (not fun for me or people around me). Sometimes the environment makes it happen:

I will look at one particular night when I had awful sleep, Oura showed the following scores:

Oura sleep scores with bad night

I rarely get scores like this. Now, what does Veristable tell us on June 21 blood sugar levels?

For lunch, I ate salmon soup and that caught my attention:

I got a score of 4! I got the same score on Christmas eve when I ate a huge amount of Christmas porridge with blueberry soup. Salmon soup can be considered as low carb, as we can see from the product package:

However, I did also have intense work meetings after lunch that could increase my blood sugar levels. There are many scientific studies linking stress and high blood sugar levels with a significant correlation [5].

Most likely both of these affected my blood sugar levels, but I’m guessing poor sleep had more effect. 

For dinner, I ate caesar salad, something that I eat often. Work meeting was already over, so there wasn’t stress based on my HRV measurements:

With Caesar Salad I got worst scores thus far:

Caesar salad bad glucose scores

It’s mind-blowing that scores can be that bad with caesar salad.

Highest value was 151 mg/dL. It seems that with poor sleep (and little bit stress) your body handles the food like its chocolate cake, regardless what you eat.

For comparison, I ate same caesar salad from same restaurant 2 days earlier with following scores (Only difference was watermelon versus strawberries):

Caesar salad good details

The highest peak was 119 mg/dL, which got me a solid score of 9. If we compare these Ceasar salads:

3. Conclusion

As expected, blood sugar was significantly higher after a bad night of sleep. Still, it’s fascinating that in a situation like this, caesar salad moves the blood sugar needle-like its yummy chocolate cake.

For further experiments, I like to understand better stress’s role on blood sugar versus a bad night of sleep.

Also, I like to dive deep on the subject of how to reduce your blood sugar spikes if you had a bad night of sleep.

Ps. You can use my referral link to get 30 dollars off from your first Veri sensor order or use code VSM-ILMOST 

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