It occurs to me glycemic load may be a factor. This is only a small study but it suggests an effect of high glycemic load (eg from poor diets) on depression and maybe fatigue. Also that these are worse for obese people, and poor diet causes obesity.
Also “sugar rush” is a thing I’ve seen in children. I didn’t used to think it was true, but having seen the same child over and over, and sometimes there is a sugar bomb in her evening and those evenings are weird for hours after in predictable ways, on a predictable timecourse… Its an N=1 study that I’ve seen replicate quite a few times, if that makes sense.
Also, if you want to try to model the next layer down, there’s a whole universe of mechanisms aiming to keep fuel available in the blood at a steady level, with a liver full of glycogen ready to be released via glucagon signaling.
Then food produces shocks to this. I remember attending a Quantified Self meetup a while back and being surprised at how obvious and large the blood sugar level fluctuations could be in a non-diabetic person over two or three days of realtime monitoring “for curiosity’s sake” with very very clear signals from eating events.
My vague recollection (not strongly backed by direct observation of realtime blood sugar monitoring, but more from the “lore” passed around among diabetics) is that dietary sugar causes a bump over ~2 hours of time. And protein over maybe 6. And fat over maybe 12?
I feel like a heuristic of “eat more weird fats more often” isn’t insane. Coconut soup? Avocados! The fat of grassfed cows!! And so on :-)
It occurs to me glycemic load may be a factor. This is only a small study but it suggests an effect of high glycemic load (eg from poor diets) on depression and maybe fatigue. Also that these are worse for obese people, and poor diet causes obesity.
Also “sugar rush” is a thing I’ve seen in children. I didn’t used to think it was true, but having seen the same child over and over, and sometimes there is a sugar bomb in her evening and those evenings are weird for hours after in predictable ways, on a predictable timecourse… Its an N=1 study that I’ve seen replicate quite a few times, if that makes sense.
Also, if you want to try to model the next layer down, there’s a whole universe of mechanisms aiming to keep fuel available in the blood at a steady level, with a liver full of glycogen ready to be released via glucagon signaling.
Then food produces shocks to this. I remember attending a Quantified Self meetup a while back and being surprised at how obvious and large the blood sugar level fluctuations could be in a non-diabetic person over two or three days of realtime monitoring “for curiosity’s sake” with very very clear signals from eating events.
My vague recollection (not strongly backed by direct observation of realtime blood sugar monitoring, but more from the “lore” passed around among diabetics) is that dietary sugar causes a bump over ~2 hours of time. And protein over maybe 6. And fat over maybe 12?
I feel like a heuristic of “eat more weird fats more often” isn’t insane. Coconut soup? Avocados! The fat of grassfed cows!! And so on :-)
This is pretty interesting, I’ll take a look into it. Thank you.