"Ophelia" writes:

I don't have a clue what my bg is. Ought I to know, or would know if
there was a problem?

I think it's a very useful thing to know. If you're overweight, there's
a good chance that your blood sugar isn't well controlled. If your BG
doesn't come back to normal within two hours after eating, that means
either A) your pancreas isn't producing as much insulin as it should, or
B) it's producing insulin like crazy, but you're insulin resistant
enough that all that insulin isn't able to convince your cells to pull
the glucose out of your blood. The latter may eventually wear your
pancreas out to the point of Type II diabetes.

A doctor can do a fasting BG test, but for $50-$100 in equipment and
strips you can test yourself multiple times: fasting, when waking up,
one hour and two hours after meals, after exercise, etc. That'll give
you a much better picture of how your body handled glucose than a single
test will. You can also test after foods like sugar alcohols, which
seem to cause a BG spike in some people and not others, to see how they
affect you.

When I started testing, just seeing the numbers was the shock to my
system that I needed to make me realize what I was doing to my health.
I could no longer tell myself it wouldn't hurt to have one more pizza
binge, that I could put off the diet tomorrow, because it wasn't just
about weight loss anymore, but about quality of life and making sure I
won't be getting anything amputated or going blind. When you look at
that meter and see 190 two hours after a carby meal, knowing that
anything over 140 means organ damage is occurring *right now*, that's
hard to brush off. On the other hand, seeing a nice healthy 89 two
hours after a great low-carb lasagna (with Swiss chard for noodles) is
really gratifying.

Hmm... we don't have that recorded on our food, although I always
choose organic. I wonder if that has anything to do with pasture
raised? I had thought saturated fat was the healthy one, although you
have cut it down, not out.

Saturated fat isn't bad for you like we've been taught, but it's not
especially good for you either. It really depends on what else you're
eating, which is why some studies made saturated fats look bad: people
were eating them in combination with too many carbs and not enough
omega-3 fatty acids.

Your body knows how to convert saturated fat into unsaturated, which is
good, because saturated fats aren't very flexible (think butter compared
to olive oil), so you don't want a lot of them making up your cell
membranes. However, this process requires certain enzymes, and the
production process that leads to those enzymes begins with omega-3 fatty
acids. If you're eating the typical modern diet that has an
omega-6/omega-3 ratio of twenty or more to one, you may not produce
enough of those enzymes, and your cell membranes will be stiffer than
would be best. This can worsen insulin resistance, among other things,
because it makes it harder for the receptors in the membrane to move
around and do things.

So if you're eating right otherwise, saturated fats aren't a threat the
way they are to the grain eaters, because you'll be able to use them
well. If you're eating low-carb, you're almost automatically going to
have a better omega-6/omega-3 ratio than "normal", because most grains
are very high in omega-6. Fish oil and sardines can improve the ratio
even more, and as Jackie said, pasture raised animal products are better
than those from grain-fed animals.

Trans-fats are the only fat that's truly harmful in all cases. Like
saturated fat, they're inflexible, but unlike saturated fat, they
haven't been around long enough for us to evolve a mechanism for
converting them into a flexible form. So the body just plugs them into
the cell walls as-is and hopes for the best, especially if you're short
on healthy fats. You really don't want to consume *any* trans-fats,
ever, if you can possibly avoid it.

(Most of this is condensed from Protein Power Life Plan, by the way; so
grab a copy of that for a detailed explanation.)



--
Aaron -- 285/254/200 -- aaron.baugher.biz