Dr. William Davis

Cardiologist + Author + Health Crusader

"The food you eat is making you sick and the agencies that are providing you with guidelines on what to eat are giving dangerous advice with devastating health consequences. You can change that today."

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Non-invasive continuous glucose monitoring a game-changer . . . for DIET

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Headlines over the past year have speculated over when Apple will finally release its non-invasive continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) watch. Such a device has been hailed as a game-changer for people with diabetes, as no finger sticks are required, no needles, no blood.

It will indeed be a game-changer for ease of glucose management for people with diabetes, making blood sugar monitoring a snap. But it will also be a game-changer for diet. Let me explain.

NON-DIABETIC people wearing a CGM device will observe several phenomena:

  • They will see just how high blood sugar rises after a bowl of oatmeal. By finger stick, for instance, you can see a fasting glucose rise to 150-180 mg/dl within minutes in a non-diabetic. Diabetics can easily see 300-500 mg/dl. When non-diabetics see diabetes-like blood sugars after a bowl of unsweetened, stone-ground, organic oatmeal, they will understand just how destructive this food is.
  • They will see how whole grains raise blood sugar sky-high, hardly any different than white flour products. And they will see how frequently this happens, explaining why insulin resistance, visceral fat accumulation, and the phenomena of glycation develop (accelerated skin aging, cataracts, joint cartilage deterioration/arthritis, heart disease, dementia) with grain consumption.
  • They will see that fructose-rich foods such as agave nectar, high-fructose corn syrup-sweetened foods, etc. do not raise blood sugar immediately, but do so in a delayed fashion many hours to days later.
  • They will see how foods like pasta (i.e., durum wheat that is pressed and compressed) raises blood sugar less severely than bread or rolls (but still to high levels), but blood sugar stays high for many hours after consumption due to slower digestion of the amylopectin.
  • They will see how hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) results after high blood sugar. They will also understand that hypoglycemia is accompanied by intense hunger.
  • They will appreciate that low-fat or reduced-fat foods raise blood sugar higher than full-fat foods.
  • They will see that the common advice from dietitians to consume carbohydrate foods with proteins, fats, and fiber to blunt rises in blood sugar is nonsense: Blood sugar still goes high, but just a few milligrams lower than carbs in isolation. Remember: Less bad is not necessarily good.
  • They will see just how awful gluten-free processed foods made with cornstarch, rice flour, tapioca starch, and potato flour raise blood sugar higher than any other food, commonly making non-diabetics diabetic within a short time.

In other words, the ease and immediacy of a non-invasive CGM watch will expose the lies, misconceptions, and common misunderstandings of diet. It will spark a massive exodus away from the harms of low-fat foods and towards low-carb eating.

For our purposes, it will make becoming non-diabetic for type 2 diabetics darned easy, since the No Change Rule that we follow will be easy-as-pie to implement.

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Comments & Feedback...

  1. Will one be able to get one of these devices without a prescription? I wanted to get a Dexcom, G6 but you need a prescription and my physician won’t prescribe one since I’m not diabetic.

    • need2Bundoctored wrote: «Will one be able to get one of these devices without a prescription?»

      That’s an interesting question. Abbott makes a product that competes with the Dexcom (Freesyle Libre), had originally wanted it to be non-prescription, and didn’t get FDA approval for OTC sales.

      It’s not clear to me whether the concern was due to being mildly invasive (skin prick) or due to accuracy. The fine print on the Abbott pages claims that you have to confirm the CGM’s readings with a fingerstick meter before adjusting meds.
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      • My type 1 husband has the Freestyle Libre. It is a game changer! Downsides are: the further away from 70 it gets, the less accurate it gets. So up at 240+ it can be 20 points off (low). But once you know that, you can work with it. And also, you can use a traditional finger stick at that point to get an accurate reading. It has an arrow to show how you are trending. Very handy. Each sensor lasts 10 days. But you have to remove it for x-rays and other tests. Since you only get 3 a month this is a bit problematic. Isn’t packaged with a lancing device. So if you don’t have an old one lying around, you have to buy that separately. You have to wait 12 hours after applying the sensor to use it. But other than that it is great. I’m itching to steal it from him!

  2. I love oatmeal. I used to melt a dark chocolate bar in it every morning. I never got intense hunger afterwards though. I usually wasn’t hungry until at least a day afterwards.

    • DLM wrote: «I love oatmeal.»

      And so does Big Food™. They babble about it being “heart healthy” (it’s not), but what it really does is provoke a variety of optional chronic ailments that Standard of Care can pretend to treat, at some great cost.

      If non-invasive OTC CGM makes it to market, people are going to have their eyes opened about the top problem with oats (list below). These sensors, alas, won’t also be able to warn them about the others.

      Oats report card:
      ☒ 56% net carb as glucose polysaccharides
      ☒ various responses to the avenin protein
      ☒ high (70%) risk of Ochratoxin A contamination
      ☒ material risk of gluten cross-contamination
      ☒ various pesticide uptakes (even if Organic)
      ☒ phytates
      ☑ 11% fiber (2-9% beneficial prebiotic beta-glucans)
      ☑ apparently no lectins (despite internet assertions to the contrary)
      There are safer ways to get the prebiotic fiber.
      ________
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  3. Oats aren’t bad for your heart (unless you eat the sugar-laden, small flake oats) nor are they promoting optional chronic ailments. The fiber lowers cholesterol and is unique to oats in that it keeps you full for a long time.

    A quick search showed that Ochratoxin A is in many foods (many of which Wheat Belly encourages consumption of) like cheeses, nuts and meats. An epidemiological study showed no human health risk with OTA consumption, though the authors conceded that the study had some limitations. My guess is that the dose makes the poison. If you were consuming oats all the time then you might be taking in hazardous amounts of OTA.

    You can buy gluten free oats if you’re concerned about the possible gluten exposure as well. Also, there’s pesticides in all vegetables (even organic). Sometimes pesticides used in organic farming are worse for you than non-organic grown crops. It’s just a huge money-grab when you think about it. Organic foods are often double the cost. You could however pick from EWG’s “Dirty Dozen and Clean 15” foods to help keep your pesticide intake as low as possible.

    Phytates are actually good for you. You wouldn’t want to be consuming them all the time in large amounts, but evidence shows that they’re beneficial against cancer, diabetes and heart disease. You can also soak grains, oats and nuts to remove the phytic acid.

    • DLM wrote: «Oats … The fiber lowers cholesterol…»

      What “cholesterol”, and why is lowering it a benefit?

      A quick search suggests that the hand waving is about “LDL”, which is a uselessly vague abbreviation, presumably the not-actually-measured LDL-C (and even there, we need to know which “C”, Friedewald, Iranian or Martin-Hopkins), and even then we’d need to know what actually measured lipid caused the calculation to change. If, for example, it’s because TG went up, that’s exactly the opposite of heart healthy.

      re: «You could however pick from EWG’’s “Dirty Dozen and Clean 15” foods to help keep your pesticide intake as low as possible.»

      Organic-approved field pesticides may have adverse effects on gut flora. I doubt EWG is even awake to this issue yet. Grains, simply due to the convenience of extended shelf life, also have to do something about fungus in storage and transport. Again, any organic agents are a possible microbiome problem. Avoiding all grains avoids these issues.

      Oats remain strongly discouraged in this program. The one clear benefit they have (prebiotic fiber), you can get without the baggage.
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      • Thanks for the reply. You realize there’s pesticides used in organic farming though right? Organic doesn’t mean pesticide-free.

        • DLM wrote: «You realize there’s pesticides used in organic farming though right?»

          That was the point I was making with; “Organic-approved field pesticides may have adverse effects on gut flora.”

          Here’s a site selling various. The problem is that these agents may have been tested for overt human responses, but haven’t been tested for long-term distortions of human microbiome…

          …because essentially nothing has been tested for that. How to do so is simply not yet known.

          So yes, an heirloom organic cabbage may not have Bt genes, but it may have been dusted with Bt. Gut consequences? Open question.
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          • “but haven’t been tested for long-term distortions of human microbiome…”

            What reason do we have to believe that the pesticides used distort the microbiome?

          • DLM wrote: «What reason do we have to believe that the pesticides used distort the microbiome?»

            The spectrum of microbes in the human gut is already known to include bacteria, eukaryotic parasites, fungi (e.g. yeasts), protozoans and viruses – lifeforms from pretty much everywhere in the tree of life.

            Afield, and in transport, storage and packaging, pesticides and preservatives (organic or not) are intended to disrupt pests from these same taxa. Do we suppose that only happens exogenously?

            Although the organic agents may be tested for basic food safety (don’t kill rodents rapidly), no one is routinely studying microbiome effects, in large part because exactly how and what to test is largely a mystery at present. Many of the affected lifeforms may not even have names yet.

            Just considering the case of the apparently unrelated artificial sweeteners, the reason why they don’t deliver on their vague promise of weight loss appears to be because they act as pesticides in the gut.

            So where does that leave us?
            On our own is where.
            We do have what appears to be several risk dials.
            Some of them can’t be turned down completely to zero.
            Many of them go to 11, tho.

            Bt dust you can at least wash off some organic foods. Bt genes, on the other hand, turn the food itself into a pesticide. It’s easy to make a case for being cautious about certain GMOs, but “organics” don’t get a free pass, with the current state of knowledge and testing standards.
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  4. I was vegan for awhile (3 years or so), and was experiencing panic attacks and fainting spells for quite awhile. Not knowing what the cause was, i re introduced dairy into my diet ( a glass of hot milk before bed from a local dairy) about 5 or so days ago. The panic episodes and whatnot have almost totally cleared up. Could it have been a vitamin b12 deficiency? If so, is there a supplement i could take that would aid in that repair process? I know you the wheat belly diet says to b careful with dairy. I hope that my question inst too messy, thanks for all your help as always.

    • Michael Maldonado wrote: «…panic attacks and fainting spells for quite awhile.»

      There are lots of suspects for panic attacks, which may or may not be related to the vegan diet. You’ve probably been off grains for some time now, so wheat’s role in panic is off the table. One worthy of investigation is gut flora. Mood is just one of many things that gut microbes can materially influence.

      The fainting, on the other hand, might need some actual medical investigation, which I presume you have been doing. Blood sugar, blood pressure, general blood chemistry, etc. A proper thyroid panel (which is not just TSH) is always worth a look, too.

      re: «Could it have been a vitamin b12 deficiency?»

      The majority of the micronutrient deficiencies I linked to, in a response to you back March, have neurological consequences if allowed to become severe, and B12 appears to one one of them.

      re: «If so, is there a supplement i could take that would aid in that repair process?»

      B12 is available by itself or in B-complexes. Unless you know your MTHFR status, stick with the methylated forms of B12 (and B9), and naturally they are more expensive, so not usually found in the supplement aisle at the GenericMart (which instead contain cyanocobalamin and folic acid).
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  5. “DLM wrote: «What reason do we have to believe that the pesticides used distort the microbiome?»”

    I cannot respond under that comment. Interesting points though, thanks.

    • DLM wrote: «… is this Wheat-Belly-compatible…»

      Due to a huge download in progress, and limited bandwidth, I can’t play videos at the moment (and may not be able to for the remainder of the day), and the YouTube auto-transcript for that is near gibberish. Can you translate?
      ________
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        • DLM wrote: «I think you need a new computer…»

          Computer is fine. It’s the 2 Mbps rural wireless bandwidth (the former Motorola Canopy tech). I could upgrade it to 5, but we so rarely would use the extra Mbps that I don’t want to spring for it yet. Waiting for Elon to launch his constellation.

          Meanwhile, back on organic pesticides, this just turned up in the news today:
          Bloomberg: Scientists Want to Replace Pesticides With Bacteria

          What could possibly go wrong? ☣

          This could actually be a great idea, but even if they wanted to have some confidence about long-term microbiome-health effects, there is insufficient insight to design trials for it, and today, such trials would be sabotaged by IRB insistence on using otherwise consensus diets (which are fatally high noise environments in which to look for subtle gut and immune effects).

          What needs serious development, for suitable pest targets (insects and weeds, mainly), is solar-powered opto-mechanical robots, that constantly patrol the crop rows and zap the pests with RF, masers or lasers. The weeds could just be pulled.
          ________
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    • DLM – Are you referring to the “Cinnamon Toast Crunch” in that YouTube video you provided the link for?

      It’s impossible to comment on the “Wheat Belly” relevance of this as we have no idea what the Cinnamon Toast Crunch is made from.

      • “It’s impossible to comment on the “Wheat Belly” relevance of this as we have no idea what the Cinnamon Toast Crunch is made from.”

        I was joking. It blows the net carb budget out of the water. ? It’s the cereal Cinnamon Toast Crunch which is already outrageously loaded with sugar on top of carbs. And he puts brown sugar on top of it.

        • I think this is relevant to all WB followers and not just myself where I find even an apple to be very sweet and tasty, whereas compared to my former self on a grain based diet, I looked for more and more sweetness in refined carbs, deserts, sugary drinks, etc. I have an entirely new appreciation of even subtler levels of sweetness and non starchy vegetables following WB. It’s amazing how radical the shift is in taste buds. Are so called picky eaters really just carb addicts?