What I learned this week #1

Caffeine causes acute insulin resistance ☕

During my usual social and YouTube binging on metabolic issues I've encountered a lot of opinions on avoiding caffeine so I looked it up and sure enough, yes it can impair insulin sensitivity in the short term.

The immediate effect of caffeine consumption is an increase in hormones and neurotransmitters that reduces the ability of muscles to take up glucose. This is essentially a short-term increase in insulin resistance. That's going to mean that you need to produce more insulin to bring blood glucose down, especially after eating. High insulin levels are the fundamental cause of type 2 diabetes so caffeine consumption needs to be considered.

Consumption of freshly ground coffee in the long-term is known to have beneficial effects for glycemic control and lowers the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. This is generally beleived to be a result of other beneficial compounds found in coffee. I am generally suspicious of instant coffee as I assume most of these healthy components are removed or destroyed in the processing of it. Not that I don't drink it! Making the freshly ground stuff takes a lot of time.

Why does this matter?

I usually drink around 5 mugs of tea per day and my main concern has been microdosing on glucose in the milk that I have with these. I don't get glucose spikes but I do suspect it takes longer for my blood glucose levels to come down when I'm drinking a lot of them. Lactose is a combination of glucose and galactose (as opposed to sucrose comprising glucose and fructose). I don't think anyone's getting diabetes from galactose (fructose is the bad guy). So, I've generally not been too worried about the extra 2g of carbs from each mug of tea. The caffeine issue is more of a concern when it comes to breakfast. I usually have a mug of tea when I wake up in the morning. My blood glucose is already on the up due to dawn phenomenon so the last thing I want to do at this time of the day is to inhibit insulin. Having breakfast after a mug of tea is going to increase the amount of blood glucose and the resulting insulin level required to bring that back down to baseline is going to be higher than if I hadn't had any cafenated drink.

My general goal for mornings is to keep my blood glucose below 10 mmol/L as that is the generally accepted upper limit of the safe zone before you start getting symptoms of hyperglycemia (which for me is rushing to the toilet as soon as I get to the office in a morning). Dawn phenomenon usually gets me to 10, or very close to it, so I've been having very low carb breakfasts (pork/eggs/green veg) which helps with this. I've been cutting down on my usual yoghurt, nuts and berries option as that does have around double the net carbs.

Well all this doesn't bode well for my morning cuppa 🥹

What to do about it

Sponsored

I struggled to find where to buy non-homogenised milk locally and eventually found The Modern Milkman. Their organic whole milk in my area is non-homogenised so I've been getting milk and eggs from them for two yeas now. Use this link to get 50% off your first two weeks and they'll give me 50% off my next delivery as well. Cheers!