List All You Know That Reduces Hyperglycemia And Or FFA?

[GorillaHead]

Hey guys I would like to put a thread together that adds to everything we know that reduces hyperglycemia and ffa levels.

I will start niacin and cinnamon.

 

[Jessie]

Very few substances I know of tbh. Sugar, aspirin, B3, and pyrucet are the only widely accessible options I know. The doping drug (originally for heart patients) Mildronate seems to work as well.

Of course, if you have problems burning glucose for fuel, just simply reducing the amount of dietary fat in your diet can push things away from fat oxidation as well.

Thyroid hormone can increase utilization of glucose, but it also increases fat burning too.

 

[GorillaHead]

I think hyperglycemia isn’t caused by having problems burning glucose but rather burning fat. Fat itself that interferes with the glucose burning

 

[yerrag]

It's not about substances - you can name them all and try them all - and come up empty. Understand how the body regulates blood sugar first.

This article on understanding insulin's primary role as an inhibitor of different many metabolic pathways will give you a more systems-level understanding of blood sugar regulation. If one doesn't have this understanding, he will just be wasting time, effort, and money testing different substances to lower blood sugar. Our understanding of insulin has been shaped wrongly by medical propaganda. Begin by correcting that false understanding.

I think there is a bandwagon mentality in this forum of trying different substances and nootropics because that seems to be what a lot of people here are doing. One can get carried away by following this crowd. Even if you managed, by some dint of luck, to be able to lower your blood sugar to an optimal level and achieve stable blood sugar levels, you would still be relying on a nootropic version of a maintenance drug. This is only a slight improvement from taking big pharma maintenance drugs. When are you then going to solve your being dependent on this drug? If instead of finding a silver bullet, where just a substance will solve the problem, why not focus on understanding how the body works, and then figure out what's wrong with it that causes the blood sugar to be high, and then start managing the sub-optimal condition in the beginning, as you go about fixing the things that causes poor blood sugar regulation?

It takes some involved reading to gain that level of understanding, but it won't take as long as spending years of doing personal trial by error that gets you nowhere. It's good to remember the story of the turtle vs. the hare.

 

[GorillaHead]

It's not about substances - you can name them all and try them all - and come up empty. Understand how the body regulates blood sugar first.

This article on understanding insulin's primary role as an inhibitor of different many metabolic pathways will give you a more systems-level understanding of blood sugar regulation. If one doesn't have this understanding, he will just be wasting time, effort, and money testing different substances to lower blood sugar. Our understanding of insulin has been shaped wrongly by medical propaganda. Begin by correcting that false understanding.

I think there is a bandwagon mentality in this forum of trying different substances and nootropics because that seems to be what a lot of people here are doing. One can get carried away by following this crowd. Even if you managed, by some dint of luck, to be able to lower your blood sugar to an optimal level and achieve stable blood sugar levels, you would still be relying on a nootropic version of a maintenance drug. This is only a slight improvement from taking big pharma maintenance drugs. When are you then going to solve your being dependent on this drug? If instead of finding a silver bullet, where just a substance will solve the problem, why not focus on understanding how the body works, and then figure out what's wrong with it that causes the blood sugar to be high, and then start managing the sub-optimal condition in the beginning, as you go about fixing the things that causes poor blood sugar regulation?

It takes some involved reading to gain that level of understanding, but it won't take as long as spending years of doing personal trial by error that gets you nowhere. It's good to remember the story of the turtle vs. the hare.

Isn’t hypeinsulinemia not the same thing as high blood sugar tho.

 

[yerrag]

They usually come together when type 2 diabetic, but that won't be the case with type 1 diabetics.

I view insulin as like a stress hormone. At an optimal state, it has to be low as it's not needed anymore when blood sugar is maintained at an optmal level - not too high to cause an insulin spike, and not too low as to become hypoglycemic and induce an adrenalin reaction - somewhere around 75 to 90 (just my approximation). The little insulin in the blood that's left is really to help with glucose absorption in tissues into muscles, but not needed for other tissues such as the brain.

 

[Zigzag]

@yerrag When it comes to abusing various substances I agree, but people with already damaged beta cells might not have any other choice.

 

[yerrag]

@yerrag When it comes to abusing various substances I agree, but people with already damaged beta cells might not have any other choice.

That applies to people with type I diabetes, yes. But there are more people with type 2 diabetes, and with high insulin resistance.

And even with people with damaged beta cells, there are still ways to to restore beta cells by providing conditions to the pancreatic stem cells to develop into beta cells. Ray Peat talks about this, and Gershom Zajicek in one of his Youtube videos goes about how to go about it.

And when there is a known defect that keeps the body from producing endogenous substances is when we can use exogenous substances to fill that void. That can happen when an organ is already dysfunctional, as usually happens with degeneration from old age or from being subjected to years of stress that hasn't been corrected.

But we need to correct those stresses that lead to degeneration while we can, instead of relying on substances permanently to compensate for what the body cannot produce because the stress that's destroying the functionality of organs and tissues is not being eliminated. The substances we take are meant to tide us over while a condition exists, not meant to be a permanent crutch though.

In the case of poor blood sugar regulation, it's often a case of poor sugar metabolism. But it's also a virtual cycle at play where one affects the other and vice versa. Both are optimal or both are sub-optimal. When optimal, there is a virtuous cycle. When very sub-optimal, there is a vicious cycle.

For example, if hypothyroid, glucose metabolism slows down, and glucose absorption slows down as the glucose going to the tissues isn't being used up at a normal rate. The slower absorption of sugar causes the blood sugar to increase, as the rate that sugar is being absorbed by tissues is slower than the rate that blood sugar is being assimilated from say drinking a glass of OJ, which has a lot of simple sugars that assimilates quickly into the blood. The resulting high blood sugar causes an insulin spike, in which the pancreas produce a lot of insulin. The large amount of insulin signals the liver to convert the blood sugar to fatty acids, which often is an exaggerated response, leading to blood sugar becoming too low. When blood sugar is that low, glycogen is converted to blood sugar and this causes the blood sugar level to recover. But during that time when the blood sugar is low, glucose metabolism is interrupted and low energy results. The low energy would cause the liver to not be able to convert T4 to T3 and without the T3 , glucose metabolism is somehow impaired. So you can see how it becomes a vicious cycle. So it's important to understand what's going on and being able to visualize the interplay involved, so that you can begin to see where you needed to intervene with some supplementation for example, in order to break that vicious cycle.

But if you can't visualize what's going on, and you're taking a substance which someone recommends to you, you're not going to be able to troubleshoot your condition because you have no clue how the substance is impacting your blood sugar metabolism. This is on the glucose metabolism end of things. But how about on the blood sugar regulation end of it?

Let's say you don't know you're hypoglycemic (as many people don't know they are. Doctors say you're normal when you're hypoglycemic as doctors only detect hyperglycemia, usually referred to as diabetes). And you come on board RPF as a newbie and you hear folks singing good things about how they feel so good on a lot of OJ, ditching bread and rice, and all things that have to do with starch. And they would associate this with something called a "Ray Peat Diet." And you think, if it works for them I should follow them. The thing is, you're a newbie. And you didn't really bother to read anything about what Ray Peat had written, and if you did, you read it without understanding and retaining anything you've read. They're rather long reads, and they can get you to sleep right away. So you decide to just learn as you go. You start drinking OJ and you find yourself becoming more stressed drinking it. But you ignore it as "it's supposed to be good. People say so." You think maybe it's a healing reaction, eventually I'll be fine because everyone says so. You get hungry or sleepy quickly after you drink OJ, and then you drink another glass and you feel better. Soon you find yourself drinking a lot of OJ and you think the more of it should be good as it's very Peaty. And then you think this is good as people say that eating many small meals a day is good for people like you. So you drink OJ every two hours. You think this is normal for people like you, who "graze" like cows and sheep.

But it's wrong - obviously. Instead, you could have asked around the forum, describing your problem. Someone may give you an answer that leads to suspect that you're hypoglycemic. And he'd recommend taking some complex carbs instead of orange juice. Because the orange juice can quickly turn into sugar, and quickly get assimilated into your blood stream. Imagine a flash flood and that's what drinking OJ is to you. Quickly your blood sugar rises, and quickly your blood sugar will go down because of the insulin that's secreted in reaction to the surge in blood sugar. Instead, for your condition, where sugar metabolism is very slow, you need to eat a carb that doesn't come down as a flash food into your blood stream. A carb that is digested more slowly would produce sugar that is slowly assimilated into your blood stream. Instead of a flash flood, it's a relative trickle of a stream that flows into the blood stream. This stream takes say 6-7 hours to stop flowing, as compared to the flash flood that takes an hour to stop supplying sugar to the blood. A carb like brown rice can take that long to slowly supply sugar to blood, and keep blood sugar from rising so suddenly. It could help someone who's hypoglycemic keep from having those sugar lows. Whereas before he would have low energy throughout the day, he would feel well energized throughout the day.

Once you got to manage your condition well, you can go about fixing your known condition. You could say go on a 4 yr cold turkey on PUFA. And after 4 years, you could find that just by ditching PUFA you could eventually be able to drink OJ as your carb source. And if not, you are able to keep tuning your sugar metabolism until such a point you could say you could ditch rice and bread and just go with sugar, if you so desire. That is your choice, but I personally still like to have rice. But at least you have the freedom to choose.

 

[Vegancrossfit]

Randle cycle

- in case of high blood sugar: eat less fat. Dropped my A1c from 6.2% down to 5.4% over a few months this way

- in case of low blood sugar: eat more fat

Anyone can write hypothetical walls of texts but that’s what it consistently boils down to. FFAs going high is a consequence of insufficient glucose and insulin (insulin inhibits HSLipase)

 

[yerrag]

Anyone can make short sentences and boast about their brevity while not fully understanding some key concepts.

Laughable and ill-advised to make a frontal challenge.

 

[yerrag]

in case of high blood sugar: eat less fat. Dropped my A1c from 6.2% down to 5.4% over a few months this way

Big deal for you, isn't it?

Pls. research what Ray Peat said about HbA1c and report back to me.

 

[yerrag]

Should you be wishing you were less cocky coming in here with the intent to insult me? What, cat got your tongue?

 

[Peater Piper]

I believe coffee played a role in lowering my A1C, which happened over the course of six months or so.

 

[Recoen]

@yerrag what do you think about the research showing you have to consume ~500g of glucose for lipogenesis? Obviously metabolic rate and other factors are important.

 

[Jessie]

Yeah, it's been in my experiences that dietary protein is more lipogenic than carbohydrate. Of course, this likely means I have some sort of impairment with storing glycogen, because the only way for protein to be converted into fat is for it to first go through gluconeogenesis.

And this pathway for protein is only going to be upregulated in the presence of inferior glycogen storage. But I lost some additional weight just by replacing some protein in my diet with more carbs.

And like, at the time, I didn't really think I needed to lose weight. I've never been excessively fat. So I thought that was crazy, when I flattened out more by REDUCING protein. You never hear of that, lol. All you hear is to eat MORE protein if you wanna lose weight. But oh well, maybe I'm just weird backwards, lmao.

 

[gaze]

@yerrag but nowhere in Ray peats work or his interviews has he ever recommended complex carbs, especially for diabetics. Beans and whole grains are usually the first ones he recommends cutting out?

 

[Tarmander]

It's not about substances - you can name them all and try them all - and come up empty. Understand how the body regulates blood sugar first.

This article on understanding insulin's primary role as an inhibitor of different many metabolic pathways will give you a more systems-level understanding of blood sugar regulation. If one doesn't have this understanding, he will just be wasting time, effort, and money testing different substances to lower blood sugar. Our understanding of insulin has been shaped wrongly by medical propaganda. Begin by correcting that false understanding.

I think there is a bandwagon mentality in this forum of trying different substances and nootropics because that seems to be what a lot of people here are doing. One can get carried away by following this crowd. Even if you managed, by some dint of luck, to be able to lower your blood sugar to an optimal level and achieve stable blood sugar levels, you would still be relying on a nootropic version of a maintenance drug. This is only a slight improvement from taking big pharma maintenance drugs. When are you then going to solve your being dependent on this drug? If instead of finding a silver bullet, where just a substance will solve the problem, why not focus on understanding how the body works, and then figure out what's wrong with it that causes the blood sugar to be high, and then start managing the sub-optimal condition in the beginning, as you go about fixing the things that causes poor blood sugar regulation?

It takes some involved reading to gain that level of understanding, but it won't take as long as spending years of doing personal trial by error that gets you nowhere. It's good to remember the story of the turtle vs. the hare.

Interesting Study!

 

[yerrag]

@yerrag but nowhere in Ray peats work or his interviews has he ever recommended complex carbs, especially for diabetics. Beans and whole grains are usually the first ones he recommends cutting out?

You're not wrong there. Which was why I wrote Ray recently asking him if he could find it worthwhile to devote a newsletter to the subject of blood sugar regulation, as we'd seen what could happen to some members that go into their own "Ray Peat diet" and end up getting overweight and/or obese. He wasn't happy about that term as he never did talk about such a diet, but I explained to him that it was a convenient term to use in general as he spoke well of sugar in contrast to most so-called experts who saw sugar as evil.

And we share the same observation that Ray Peat has never recommended complex carbs. But I did tell him that, noting that his recommendation of sugar, OJ, and even Coke - is for people with optimal blood sugar control. And he did not disagree with me. I told him that people with poor blood sugar control can benefit from complex carbs instead to manage their condition, and I would recommend this to people here, but it would listen more if he were to provide some guidance on this matter as people would listen to him. He said I understood that well. But we'll see if he could grant my request.

It's because there are people like @Vegancrossfit who talk like experts, exuding so much confidence in spreading wrong ideas that people get mislead and end up with poorer health than they started with.

He is Exhibit A of Ray Peat saying that HbA1c is not a good indicator of blood sugar health. HbA1c is more a measure of the glycation of protein in our blood, as affected by the presence of PUFAs in blood. That Vegancrossfit's HbA1c went down when he ate less fat merely proved what Ray Peat was saying in his critique of this indicator.

VeganCrossfit saw his A1c go down with less fat intake. He concluded that high blood sugar can be fixed with lower fat intake. And also with the mind of a simpleton decided that if hyperglycemia can be improved with less fat intake, then it must be true that hypoglycemia can be improved with more fat intake.

As wiser ones know, nothing is that simple.

 

[gaze]

You're not wrong there. Which was why I wrote Ray recently asking him if he could find it worthwhile to devote a newsletter to the subject of blood sugar regulation, as we'd seen what could happen to some members that go into their own "Ray Peat diet" and end up getting overweight and/or obese. He wasn't happy about that term as he never did talk about such a diet, but I explained to him that it was a convenient term to use in general as he spoke well of sugar in contrast to most so-called experts who saw sugar as evil.

And we share the same observation that Ray Peat has never recommended complex carbs. But I did tell him that, noting that his recommendation of sugar, OJ, and even Coke - is for people with optimal blood sugar control. And he did not disagree with me. I told him that people with poor blood sugar control can benefit from complex carbs instead to manage their condition, and I would recommend this to people here, but it would listen more if he were to provide some guidance on this matter as people would listen to him. He said I understood that well. But we'll see if he could grant my request.

It's because there are people like @Vegancrossfit who talk like experts, exuding so much confidence in spreading wrong ideas that people get mislead and end up with poorer health than they started with.

He is Exhibit A of Ray Peat saying that HbA1c is not a good indicator of blood sugar health. HbA1c is more a measure of the glycation of protein in our blood, as affected by the presence of PUFAs in blood. That Vegancrossfit's HbA1c went down when he ate less fat merely proved what Ray Peat was saying in his critique of this indicator.

VeganCrossfit saw his A1c go down with less fat intake. He concluded that high blood sugar can be fixed with lower fat intake. And also with the mind of a simpleton decided that if hyperglycemia can be improved with less fat intake, then it must be true that hypoglycemia can be improved with more fat intake.

As wiser ones know, nothing is that simple.

would you be open to sharing your email exchanges with him?

 

[yerrag]

would you be open to sharing your email exchanges with him?

I couldn't share it as it showed a human side of him that could be mischaracterized.