ApoE4.Info

Dietary intake is a central determinant of blood glucose levels, and thus, in order to achieve normal glucose levels it is imperative to make food choices that induce normal postprandial (post-meal) glycemic responses (PPGR; Gallwitz, 2009). Postprandial hyperglycemia is an independent risk factor for the development of TIIDM (American Diabetes Association., 2015a), cardiovascular disease (Gallwitz, 2009), and liver cirrhosis (Nishida et al., 2006) and is associated with obesity (Blaak et al., 2012), and enhanced all-cause mortality in both TIIDM (Cavalot et al., 2011) and cancer (Lamkin et al., 2009).

Despite their importance, no method exists for predicting PPGRs to food. The current practice is to use the meal carbohydrate content (American Diabetes Association, 2015b, Bao et al., 2011), even though it is a poor predictor of the PPGR (Conn and Newburgh, 1936)...

Here, we set out to quantitatively measure individualized PPGRs, characterize their variability across people, and identify factors associated with this variability. To this end, we continuously monitored glucose levels during an entire week in a cohort of 800 healthy and prediabetic individuals and also measured blood parameters, anthropometrics, physical activity, and self-reported lifestyle behaviors, as well as gut microbiota composition and function. Our results demonstrate high interpersonal variability in PPGRs to the same food. We devised a machine learning algorithm that integrates these multi-dimensional data and accurately predicts personalized PPGRs, which we further validated in an independently collected 100-person cohort. Moreover, we show that personally tailored dietary interventions based on these predictions result in significantly improved PPGRs accompanied by consistent alterations to the gut microbiota.

"Elevated postprandial blood glucose levels constitute a global epidemic and a major risk factor for prediabetes and type II diabetes, but existing dietary methods for controlling them have limited efficacy. Here, we continuously monitored week-long glucose levels in an 800-person cohort, measured responses to 46,898 meals, and found high variability in the response to identical meals, suggesting that universal dietary recommendations may have limited utility."

SusanJ wrote: George, some of the criticisms of this study are that they didn't look at insulin. The researchers said it would have been extremely difficult to poke people the number of times that they would have needed it to get accurate data.