I listened to an interesting podcast recently: Kevin Rose sat down with Josh Clemente, to discuss continuous glucose monitoring (CGM). Josh is the founder of Levels, a company that tracks your blood glucose in real time, so you can “maximize your diet and exercise”.
A CGM is a device normally reserved for diabetics, but many non-diabetics have adopted them as a means of optimizing their metabolism. So what are Levels users and health experts like Rhonda Patrick and Peter Attia trying to accomplish with their CGMs? Their aim is to keep average glucose levels low, while also minimizing spikes. For example, keeping average glucose below 90 mg/dl and post-meal spikes below 120mg/dl.
In the short term, blood sugar spikes can cause you to feel tired and hungry. Over time, elevated levels increase your risk of developing serious complications, such as diabetes, alzheimers and cardiovascular disease.
So tight control over your glucose level not only helps you ward off bad health, it also helps you optimize your energy, for both physical and cognitive tasks.
The problem though, is that CGMs are expensive. If you can’t get health insurance to cover it, you’re looking at hundreds of dollars per month. In fact, depending on location, you may require a prescription to even get your hands on one.
Luckily, we can use other’s results to improve our metabolism without a CGM. Sure, we won’t know how any individual food impacts us – two people eating the same food can have wildly different responses. But a close look at the list of insights gleaned by those wearing a CGM shows us that we don’t necessarily have to follow a specific diet.
It’s possible to improve glucose control by eating earlier in the day, adding cinnamon to your diet, or simply changing the order in which you eat your food.
For more strategies like these, as well as the science behind them, click the link below.
12 glucose lowering strategies to improve metabolic fitness | Levels Health
Productivity and Procrastination
In today’s society, there is a lot to gain from having a good system for optimizing productivity. But constantly searching for, and trying out, different systems is a form of procrastination in itself.
To avoid this, take an experimental approach: Pick one time-management method and use it exclusively for a month. When the month is up, ask yourself if you really need a different method or extra tool. By committing to a single method and giving it time to work, you’ll be able to find out which productivity tools suit your needs and which just waste your time.
On Management Methods, Dramatic Donations, and Online Offers | Dan Ariely
Caffeine: the good, the bad and the ugly
Good
…the mental edge provided by caffeine helped transform work, he said, by improving focus and the ability to concentrate — keys to the safety and success of the machine-based labor that powered the Industrial Revolution as well as every generation since.
Bad
Then there is the havoc it wreaks on our sleep — particularly the deep, slow-wave sleep that is critical to memory.
Caffeine, one-quarter of which can stay in your system for up to 12 hours, then becomes the solution to the problem it creates, he said, making people who are sleep-deprived from their caffeine consumption the day before eager for a morning hit to charge them up for the day ahead.
Ugly
And we just might have to get used to having less caffeine in our lives in the future. According to some estimates, said Pollan, because of climate change, by the middle of the century 50 percent of the land currently growing coffee plants will “no longer be suitable for coffee production.”
Dear God
How caffeine changed the world | The Harvard Gazette
Shift work and heart health
A systematic review and meta-analysis was recently conducted with the aim of discovering shift work’s effect on cardiovascular health. In total, 66 articles, representing 197,063 shift workers were included in the study.
The findings:
Shift work, and particularly permanent night shift, is associated with dyslipidemia via elevated total cholesterol and triglycerides, and reduced HDL-cholesterol.
Though the results themselves are unsurprising, the authors suggest a preventive measure that goes against some of shift work’s conventional wisdom:
Promoting rotating shifts instead of permanent night shifts could be an effective preventive strategy to reduce cardiovascular risk of shift workers.
See also: Permanent Night Shift: Is it Better than a Rotation?
Shift work, and particularly permanent night shifts, promote dyslipidemia | Atherosclerosis
Sleep and joy to all
A new study sheds more light on the emotional impact of sleep loss. Again, results that aren’t particularly surprising – we usually recognize that we’re more irritated by negative events after a short sleep. Though we don’t always recognize the influence on positive events.
Shorter sleep duration causes people to react more emotionally to stressful events and find less joy in positive events the next day. Following a good night of rest, people’s reaction to positive and negative events improves dramatically.
People React Better to Both Negative and Positive Events With More Sleep | Neuroscience News
Stay healthy-
Jason Glenn