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Comment by csswizardry | Hacker News Reader

As someone who’s at the frustrating intersection of fascinated and clueless, what are the implications of a blood sugar spike and are they bad? Is the problem the absolute amount of blood sugar or is it the sudden change in blood sugar levels? And what is the general takeaway or advice from this study?

A lot of questions there, but I would be really grateful for any insights. It’s something I know I should know plenty more about.

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I'm not an expert but as someone who finds benefit from low-carbing my understanding is: if you raise sugar levels then you raise insulin levels, and at some point if your insulin is chronically raised you lose some sensitivity to the hormone (similar to how you can get tolerant to caffeine from drinking too much coffee etc), and being 'insulin resistant' can lead to many health issues.

The implication is mostly straightforward in abstract: the body has a limited ability to manage blood sugar, and when it's imbalanced other symptoms develop. In the short term this may just mean finishing a meal and being unable to focus for the next hour, longer term it might develop into something more impactful like diabetes. The specific pathways of this response and how they lead to specific symptoms are what isn't known by the science.

But it's analogous to most everything else about the body: we can't concentrate a lot of strong signals like temperature changes or physical exertion into a short timeframe and expect to stay in homeostasis. If you overdo it, that's when the problems start.

Raising insulin is bad. "Feeds" pathogenic processes and all other nasty stuff as a precursor.

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