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Comment by twawaaay | Hacker News Reader

It is your body's ability to regulate blood sugar level in presence of intakes of food or their absence.

A healthy person should have no problem maintaining blood sugar level except for very extreme situations (like running a marathon). Impaired response suggests then some kind of underlying problem.

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I’m still confused. In the context of this paper, does “impaired glycemic response” mean blood sugar levels go up but do not come down because insulin production is impaired? Or that insulin levels increase and blood sugars still do not fall? Or that the glycemic response, that is the blood sugar concentrations, do not increase in the first instance?

Right, I had the same response to that sentence, see my comment infra.

It seems to me that an "impaired" glycemic response is what is actually desired, but the word "impaired" has negative connotations. It might be typical usage in a journal article, but it is not for an article in Science.

Impaired glycemic response, when bad enough, is a cause of diabetes.

Insulin is not a bad thing, high blood glucose is.

When there is no need to immediately use glucose as a fuel (like when exercising), insulin is secreted. It acts as a signal to the rest of the body to remove glucose from the bloodstream and store it (as glycogen or fat). Without insulin (and without exercise), blood glucose levels would be too high for a long time.

They mixed glucose with the artificial sweeteners so sugar level must raise. But it didn't go down, so it seems that the sweeteners could be stopping the insulin response.

Right, and that's a good thing, because lower postprandial glycemia correlates with better health outcomes: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20234031/

I'm not sure we can equate low glycemic index foods with foods that suppress the insulin response. They might have a small insulin response in common, but their effect on blood sugar concentration is not at all the same.

I have no insight on the studio but that it's only logical "impairment" must mean the response was even less than the one expected if the same amount of glucose and no sweetener was ingested.

Otherwise it's misleading and not surprising at all.

Right, I think that's what they meant. And the result would be that your blood glucose level would spike much higher than if you had a normal insulin response. It's unclear what the health effects of that would be.

I found another paper [1] that implies that "impaired glycemic response" is measured by an "oral glucose tolerance test" and that high levels of blood glucose in the two hours after drinking a glucose solution are what they mean by an impaired response. The graphical abstract [2] from the paper discussed in the Science article has "glycemic response" graphs, which I assume are from this oral glucose tolerance test, although I wasn't able to access the paper's PDF.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Impaired-glycemic-respon...

[2] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00919-9?_re...

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