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Comment by kevviiinn | Hacker News Reader

Why is a glucose spike bad for non diabetics

I'm not a doctor, but I believe the best way to treat your body is not to have big swings in values in glucose. If your glucose is 70 and you spike it up to 150 every day, I believe it's just a lot of stress on your body's endocrine system.

Someone can definitely chime in and correct me though.

You not only get the downside of high glucose levels from the spike, but you get the downside of the insulin your body produced in response (or you injected because you're diabetic) kicking in as the spike falls on it's own, making it crash even further.

Spiking and recovering is probably better than consistently elevated for insulin sensitivity reasons.

Having big swings in your heart rate daily is healthy.

Glucose spike -> oh shit blood is full of sugar, pump out insulin -> blood is suddenly not full of sugar anymore -> feel like shit, want to eat again -> glucose spike...

That doesn't explain why it's bad

Insulin will seize sugar from your blood to store it your cell reserves. You are basically forcing yourself to store fat, and require more sugar, instead of using what you have.

https://iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bmb.2...

You're just explaining a normal metabolic process, not explaining why it's bad and insulin doesn't necessarily make you crave anything

Insulin gets released after every meal

You are just playing dumb, are you. :)

If you want to know why it's bad, eat a bunch of sweets and tell me how do you feel after!

No, I'm a biochemist. I need to know the mechanism. The mechanism is important for understanding why and how something happens in a biological system, sorry I just don't take people's word at face value

You could have said something like "eating foods that continuously spike glucose could possibly cause an eventual desensitization to insulin by causing down regulation of insulin receptors"

But you don't get to type 2 diabetes by eating potatoes

Potatoes are not sweets.

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