What is the best diet? This question remains the million (probably billion) dollar question in health, nutrition and medicine. The winner will likely be the healthy diet is one that prevents the most disease and weight gain. Now there seems to be an approach that has caught the attention of patients and providers internationally and that looking at individualized post-meal glucose response as a guide to one’s individualized diet. And guess what? The researchers say that the post meal glucose response is largely dependent as to what kinds of bugs are growing in our gut. Listen in on today’s episode as we explore the individualized diet and post meal glucose response.
Some back ground information.
Post meal glucose response is defined classically as the rises in blood glucose measured in ng/dl. Why does it matter? As a biomarker it predicts one’s ability to regulate glucose. Glucose regulated means less inflammation in the body, less risk for heart disease, less risk for diabetes, less risk for kidney disease, less risk for eye disease, and less risk for obesity…you get the picture.
Typically in a non-diabetic a fasting blood glucose will range from 70 ng/dl to 99 ng/dl and after eating a carbohydrate containing meal the blood glucose will rise between 100 ng/dl-140ng/dl. This can be influenced by protein and fat content in the food source however it is largely driven by carbohydrate intake. Until researchers started looking to the gut microbiome, the large dietary agencies that be would look at glucose content of foods and make predictions as to how these foods would spike blood sugar. This list is called the glycemic index of foods. Then later they looked at how combinations of foods might spike one’s glucose and this is called glycemic load. Now a group out of the Weizmann Institute developed a test and algorithm of post meal glucose response based on DNA sequencing of the bugs that are growing in human guts. By monitoring glucose response in human subjects, they were able to predict that one’s own signature gut microbiome, can largely influence ones glucose response to food.
about our guest
Richard Sprague is a heath technology executive, biohacker, citizen scientist and engineer. He is quite the interesting man. He is the CEO of Airdoc (a medical technology company). He has been quite involved with Stool Microbiome testing using 16s rRnA metabolome sequencing. At one point he worked with Ubiome one of the pioneers in stool microbiome testing. He must own the record for the number of times he has tested his own stool microbiome (over 300). With this background he brings an interesting perspective on what is actionable within gut microbiome data.
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