Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: 14 days ago, we started an experiment and put some continuous glucose monitors on to see how our lifestyle of eating low carb and ketogenic food is affecting our blood sugar and our health on the inside.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: Hi, my name is Rich.
[00:00:18] Speaker A: And I'm Shelly.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Welcome to air to Ground farms. And this experiment that Shelly was talking about was really part of our desire to really dial in health and doing so through food. And this look we wanted to see. Hey, what does our normal diet, our normal food intake look like from a glucose perspective? And these continuous glucose monitors really did give us a glimpse.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: So this is the third video in the series. The first one, we put it on. If you guys want to. If you're new to this, you want to go back and check that out. We actually put the thing on, on camera. And then part two, we just sort of said how it's going and revealed the fact that mine hit the door when I was getting out of the car and it broke. Even though I didn't really hit it that hard, it did break. It stopped sending any kind of messages. And so I just took the thing off and then I. So for the past probably, I guess, nine days, we've been just tracking his blood sugar with what we eat. And I've pricked my finger a few times, and mine's responding generally the same. So that said, let's dive into a few of the things on why we were interested in some of this information and what are the things that we found out.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Yeah, so today, covering the.
A couple of lessons learned, maybe one big surprise. And then finally, we're going to discuss whether we're going to go into the realm of biohacking or whether we're going to take a step back and just return to our normal ketogenic lifestyle. So we'll end the discussion there.
[00:02:08] Speaker A: So you've been wearing this thing for 14 days. Overall impression?
[00:02:13] Speaker B: Overall, it has there. There is no pain. Like I was. It was one of those things. You're curious. So the little filament, we got a chance to really look at the filament as we took yours off. It's just a little filament.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: We'll do that in just a minute. Whenever I want to show what it.
[00:02:31] Speaker B: Really looks like, it's basically like if you a little bit more firm than dental floss, but not quite as firm as fishing twine. Somewhere in between those and it being on, I just. I didn't feel it when it went on. I have not felt it at all while it was on. Even like, lay down in the bed and mash on it. Nothing there. So that was a thing that I was curious about. And so it.
No pain, no issues with showering, with taking clothes off and on the. This particular brand, the ultra human that. That we used, that we got ours through, sends this kinesio tape that you put over the top of it, and it has been a true non issue having it on. So that was, like, something that I was curious.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: Comfortable enough to wear. You did change out your patch one time because it was getting a little worn, but we laid a very kind, kind of active and more sweaty lifestyle. Yeah.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: The edges of kinesio tape started peeling up, and it was catching on things, and it was pulling the hairs on my arms. And so then I was like, okay, we gotta do something different here. But the monitor itself has been a non issue.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: Having it on and retrieving the data through the app on your phone worked.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: No issue at all. So there were some gaps in data coverage. Like, I had an iOS update on my iPhone, and that caused a gap. I left my phone somewhere and went off and did chores without it. That caused a gap. So I would say maybe the next thing for me is the realization that you are, if you're wanting the data through this way of doing things, that you are really tied to your phone.
Like, most of us, I think, feel like we're tied to our smartphones anyway. But it.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: But if you're not within range, it doesn't get. You don't.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: You don't get the data.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Right?
[00:04:36] Speaker B: So the apps sort of interpolate the data. So it just takes you from last known to present data, and there's a straight line interpolation there. But without your smartphone, you get no data.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:53] Speaker B: So the. That tied to the phone thing might.
[00:04:59] Speaker A: Be a problem for some people.
[00:05:00] Speaker B: Yeah, it was even more.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: But they do make some. There are some out there, I don't know the what's in what fors, but there are some that just have a reader and you don't have to have your phone with you. So maybe if someone was interested in that, that might be a better way for them to go.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Currently, the fitness monitors offer that they all go that phone. The only one right now is the Stello through Dexcom, and it is a smarteende phone.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: Okay, well, how did the interface having to use the technology, was that user friendly, or did it, do you need to be tech savvy?
[00:05:38] Speaker B: I think that it was very user friendly. The Libre app, which is what the monitor itself links to on the phone, it was very user friendly. You. You boop it, and off it goes. It takes it about an hour for Libre to start going. I've heard that the Dexcom is faster. I don't know. We didn't try that. And then there was a step in there where we linked the ultra human app, which was the app we wanted to do from a fitness perspective, to the Libre app, so that it tells you how to do it, so that I think you have to be familiar enough with a smartphone and using apps on a smartphone, but you're not programming anything cool.
[00:06:26] Speaker A: Okay, big surprise. I think our biggest surprise was my experiment with the. With a. I drank a 16 ounce glass of raw milk with an empty stomach before we had any food for hours, and it shot straight up to 240. And now my body did make the correction. It gave me the insulin required, or I used some of it because we were out farming and doing stuff, but it went straight up. And then it kind of came. Pretty much came straight down. The interesting part was it didn't go so far down that it caused me to have a hypoglycemic problem. It just kind of went back to my normal baseline and then hung out there the rest of the time. So it went up. My body took care of it, and then it went. It went back to normal. But it was a big spike.
[00:07:23] Speaker B: It was a big spike. That was like.
I had a feeling that it would go up just because of the lactose, but that one, it went up higher than I expected.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: Yeah. And 240 is probably not it. Like, it's not some gargantuan number, but for what we found the rest of our food does, it was the highest thing that we consumed, but we did find some ways to mitigate it so that we can still have the benefit of the raw milk in our diet. And you, what did you learn about that with timing and food?
[00:08:06] Speaker B: So what I did then was I decreased the serving size to an eight ounce glass, and then I combined it. One day, I combined it with breakfast. So we had our normal keto style breakfast, which is eggs cooked in quite a bit of. Some type of fat, and a meat mixed in with the eggs with that, the milk.
Like that meal, the milk did cause my glucose to go higher than that meal normally takes it, but not much. It went up to about 135. Now, I did one meal. I combined the eggs and meat with milk and a tomato. And that meal was my highest over the two week period. That was my highest spike, was that the tomato combined with the milk, even. Even with the normal breakfast.
[00:09:05] Speaker A: Did you come way down?
[00:09:06] Speaker B: No.
[00:09:07] Speaker A: Past, like, into a hypo. Like, did your. Did you get so much insulin that I overcorrected?
[00:09:12] Speaker B: No.
[00:09:12] Speaker A: And caught an actual crash?
[00:09:14] Speaker B: Well, I mean, it identified a crash, if I remember right. I believe it identified a crash, but I don't think I went into hypoglycemia.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: Okay, so you didn't go so far as that. It caused a craving at the end. Oh, my gosh, I have to eat now.
[00:09:25] Speaker B: No, no, no, not like that. Just my highest.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:28] Speaker B: My highest time there was from that meal. And then the other thing that I did was I took just the eight ounce glass of milk. I mixed it with a tablespoon of alulose, because we've heard that all you lose can help control blood sugar. So I mixed it with a tablespoon of alulose. It made the milk taste sweet. It reminded me of Hersey's quick pink rabbit juice, you know, from a kid. It sort of tasted like that. And instead of, like, spiking up to the 200s, it went up, but it leveled off at about 135 and then came back down. So I would say that the allulose mixed with the milk did help with my body's response to the milk.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: And I don't know what happened, but I did the same thing just in case. I'm like, well, if he's going to get a benefit, I want one, too. So I put denial milk, too, and I was hoping for the best. And, you know, maybe, I don't know. Oddly enough, when you don't wear one, you really don't know. An out of sight, out of mind. So we'll get to that in just a second.
[00:10:36] Speaker B: Yeah. So the. I mentioned the meal that spiked at the highest, the next highest time over the two week period was when was during physical activity.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Right.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: And that was probably one of my biggest lessons learned, was the process through which our body fuels itself during physical.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Activity, which was cool, and we discussed it in the last video. But let's talk about the glute, glut four process and pathway. Just because we have glucose running through our bloodstream doesn't mean that insulin is required. If we are in the middle of activity and we have a need, our body gives us the energy necessary, but it opens up another pathway.
[00:11:26] Speaker B: Yeah. Glut four is a protein in our muscle cells, and when it's released, it allows the muscle cells to directly take in glucose without the presence of insulin. So normally, insulin is that doorway into our cells that allow them to intake glucose. Well, during physical activity. Our muscle cells don't need that because of this glut four. It allows them to directly take it in without insulin, which was really cool, because as I initially, as I saw my blood sugars going up during exercise, I was like, oh, gosh, what is happening? Just exercise is going to give me an insulin jolt when in reality, it doesn't have. It just gives. That's our bodies fueling us and allowing the process to work without insulin, which is really cool.
[00:12:19] Speaker A: So we had a question come. Come to us about our daily routine and the information that we. We got from this. Our daily routine looks something like this. We wake up at about 530. We have coffee, we visit, we get ready and go farm. We farm until about ten ish. We come inside, we have a couple of eggs with some butter or some sort of oil or fat, with some meats. We have more coffee with a. Sometimes we have a little bit of milk, sometimes we don't. And then we won't eat again until dinner, generally. So we. Right now, we typically eat two meals a day. We might have a snack in between, but typically, not typically, we don't. And then dinner looks like a meat, more fat, and probably a vegetable.
[00:13:17] Speaker B: Something out of our garden.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Something out of our garden. Most of our meals look like homegrown food. It is homegrown food. It's grown right here on our farm, whether it's the milk, the water coming out of the well, the tomatoes out of the garden, the chicken from our. From our farm. And so it is all homegrown food. And that is typically what our food day looks like. During the middle of the day, we will be doing an activity such as this, where we are podcasting, we are videoing, we are going to town, running a store, things like that. Still not super active, but up and doing things not necessarily completely sedentary.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: And that's also the time in which we do farm projects. So, outside of just the chores, the normal chores we do every morning and every evening, we also have projects. And we would consider a project like setting up a paddock and moving the cows, building a new hog pen, setting up a paddock, and moving pigs like those types.
[00:14:23] Speaker A: Because our farm is a rotationally grazed, regenerative run farm, everybody's got to be moving all the time. And when you have this many animals, somebody always need to be tended to. And we are in constant expansion, it seems. And so those projects come in the middle of the day. Now, when it's super hot, we try to keep that to a minimum, but you know, sometimes you just got to do what you got to do. And then by the evening, we eat our dinner, and then we have to go back out and do our evening chores because we have to collect eggs, milk a cow again. Now feed all of the pigs, give anybody the attention that they need in the evenings. And we honestly typically do not sit down in our, quote, recliners to watch any television until probably 830 at night, maybe. And then we like to go to bed somewhere by ten. That's our. That is our typical daily routine. And so in there, there are two meals.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Yep. And that's what I saw from our daily routine. If you start the day, say, at midnight or, you know, zero, zero one military time, I see a spike somewhere around 01:00 a.m. that from research, the best I can determine is it's a hormonal response due to the different sleep stages that we have. I see an increase at 05:00 a.m. when the alarm goes off. That called the dawn phenomenon, and it's our body fueling us for the day. I will see, depending on what we eat for that first meal. Well, no, I'll see an increase during our morning rounds or morning chores. For, during physical activity, there will be an increase depending on what we eat, another increase throughout the day.
It'll typically remain fairly stable if we're doing activities like this. If we're being active, we'll see the increases that we talked about during activity and then same back to a meal. And depending on what we eat, there will be a slight increase or not, and then off to bed. So really, that's it. And I think from a daily, like, if you looked at the day perspective from a medical professional, I believe that they would say basically unremarkable. It stays really fairly stable. A high of somewhere around 130 and a low of somewhere around 85. That is my normal. When I say spikes and decreases, well.
[00:17:07] Speaker A: You get natural fluctuations as your body needs it and it's staying right where it needs to be. So another commenter said, I bet it's going to be fairly flat and boring. And that's pretty much what we found, was that our low carb keto lifestyle does keep it relatively flat, which is good for our whole entire system. Where are we going to go from here?
[00:17:32] Speaker B: Yeah, we've talked about this a lot, actually.
[00:17:34] Speaker A: Yes, we have.
Summertime is the most, most busiest time on our farm and on any farm that I'm aware of, because things are just in full swing, especially with chicken season. If you do pastured poultry, that this is the time you're doing it and we are very, very busy.
That being said, I don't think that continuing down the biohacking road right now is probably going to happen here for us, just because of our busyness, trying to keep up with the store and the farm and everything else that's going on.
I think we're going to probably bring this to a conclusion for a little while, and then maybe in the winter, where we have some more brain bites and energy to pay attention to it, we may readdress it, I think is where I am with it.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: Yeah, there were definitely foods that we did not get a chance to play around with that we would like to. So I can absolutely see us doing this again in the future.
A lot of times we don't have time to eat, so we skip meals.
The idea of logging everything that we eat while we're eating it, that amount of time actually does matter for us. And so that time right now, I don't feel like we have.
[00:19:07] Speaker A: But for the. For you who are watching, the takeaway that I got from it is if you're interested in cutting your carbs or changing your lifestyle, getting away from the standard american diet, I think that this tool is a great accountability, buddy, and that it gives you the data and very objective data. You know, your little friend that's going to tell you exactly and be honest with you about the thing that you're doing. And I think for me, that is the biggest benefit to putting one of these on. Even if you consider yourself fairly healthy person, kind of into fitness or even not, I would suggest, I believe that it is a very good tool and it would be a great accountability, buddy.
[00:20:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I do, too.
[00:20:02] Speaker A: I think that had we had them when we stopped eating sugar and all of the ultra processed foods back in 2019 or 2018, and when we were diving into all of this, had we had one of these, the information and the knowledge just would have been. That would have ten x'ed it.
[00:20:21] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Because at the time, it was just, I feel different, right.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: This is giving you an actual visual why you feel different. What's really happening inside your body now? I don't have any interest, and he doesn't either of going back and trying ultra processed foods just to see what it'll do. Just to see, hey, watch this bike. This will be fun. No, we know. We know that that food isn't good for us. We know that that food is not giving us the nutrition that. That our bodies need. And there's no sense in doing that. We all know what our main goal was. Hey, what's this doing to us? Or what's our normal diet doing the way we've been living? Hey, is it working for us? Actually, the answer was yes.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:21:06] Speaker A: The answer was yes. So if you are interested in getting off of the standard american diet and switching up your lifestyle, highly recommend getting one of these things.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:18] Speaker A: So let's take that off.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: Let's show them what the.
What it kind of looks like. Again.
Again, if you. If you haven't already, go check out when we put these things on. How's that feel?
But it's pulling your hair.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: That's like a bandit.
[00:21:38] Speaker A: Okay, first of all, I'm ridiculously sticky, so move your hand.
Okay. It looks like a button. Fairly large button. And now show, how can you even pull it off by yourself? Because I had to have you help me pull that other one off.
Wow. So you can totally see where it's been. Okay, I'm gonna go close. I'm gonna come close to you guys on the. If you're listening to this, I'm. I'm going to show on the camera what this thing kind of looks like.
So you can.
[00:22:33] Speaker B: You can describe what my arm.
[00:22:36] Speaker A: So his arm looks like. It has had a sticker on it for a while. Almost like a little suction cup sticker. It's sticky and you can see the impression. You can see the impression where the. Where the little computer chip thingy was. And you could kind of see where the filament. Where the filament was in his arm for those two weeks. Does it feel good to take it off?
[00:23:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yeah. Okay, data no more. All right, we're done with this, guys.
Hey, if you're wearing a glucose monitor, what are you learning? Leave it in the comments.
Do you find that it actually does help you with what you're eating when you're eating it? Is it for medical reasons or do you just wear it for. Just for fitness so that, you know, for your health? If you're finding value in these videos, we would love it if you would make sure that you are subscribed to our channel. And if you know someone who could also benefit from this information, make sure to share it with them. Shoot them a text and send it off to those guys, too. Okay? And we thank you guys for hanging out with us again today. And until next time. Bye, y'all.
[00:23:53] Speaker B: Bye, y'all.
