Why You Probably Don’t Need A Glucose Monitor…

If you’ve seen more people wearing a small round white plastic disc on their arm – it’s a glucose monitor. It’s not that there’s been a rise in the number of people with diabetes…it is wholly thanks to social media scaremongering.

Capillary Glucose Monitors are used by some people with diabetes… and it’s important in these cases to understand glucose level fluctuation and variability and how meals can impact blood sugar control.

They are also used by those interested in tracking their “metabolic health”.

A very quick biology primer; when you eat food, one of the breakdown components is glucose which enters the bloodstream and causes your pancreas to release insulin. Insulin helps push glucose into cells and tells the liver to store some glucose for later.

The increased use of these continuous blood glucose monitors in HEALTHY PEOPLE with a normal blood glucose control and normal insulin sensitivity has gone hand in hand with this pseudoscientific idea that “spikes” in blood glucose can contribute to negative health consequences and cause inflammation in the body; a hallmark of metabolic disease.

The truth is, in the current literature we have, there is zero evidence that blood glucose spikes has any health bearing on someone with normal insulin sensitivity and who does not have diabetes.

For example, after exercising, your blood glucose rises… we can’t claim exercise and the resulting glucose spike is bad in any way – we know that exercise helps to offset metabolic disease.

If you have insulin resistance or type 1 diabetes with a lack of insulin production… persistently elevated blood glucose can have harmful effects on the body and in these cases it may be worth tracking blood glucose to ensure it doesn’t stray too high and potentially even consider strategies to reduce the “spike”; e.g. eating meals with high fibre, going for a walk after your meal, eating foods with a lower glycaemic index (ones which cause less of a spike).

Otherwise it is more hype than health and obsessively tracking superfluous data will do more harm than good.

The Hidden Taste: Umami

Sweet, Salty, Sour and Bitter…the four basic tastes but the 5^th, umami, is all around you and you’re tasting it all the time.

It was only in the early 20^th Century (1908) that a Japanese professor identified the human potential to distinguish this 5^th secret taste.

What is umami and what does it taste like? Some describe it as a meat/savoury combination but it’s more subtle than that.

Umami rather than just a taste, is a flavour enhancer and helps to boost the perception of salt and sweet in other foods… this also explains why it went hidden for so much of human history.

From a chemical perspective, it is represented as inosinate (in meat), guanylate (plants) or glutamate (meat and plants)… an example of the latter is aged cheeses or cured meat.

Umami also makes its bountiful presence known in mushrooms and tomatoes – this explains why tomato ketchup seems to go with everything… the bountiful umami-ness contained within acts as the flavour enhancer I mentioned!

What you should watch

Chef’s table: Pizza (Netflix)

If you’ve been perusing my Instagram stories recently, you may have noticed a few intriguing clips from a documentary series I’ve been watching.

I’m usually not a fan of cooking documentaries but I am a fan of pizza so this had me hooked.

The premise of the show is that pizza is not just bread, tomato sauce and cheese. It is diverse and can be manifested in many forms. The series is akin to an anthology and each episode focuses on one pizza chef from a specific part of the world who is doing something unique to transform the art of pizza making.

Some moments really had me wondering whether it was time to hang up my surgical clogs, put down my scalpel and escape to an idyllic part of the world to be a pizza making apprentice… but I digress…

Episode 5 had me in deep introspection.

A Japanese pizza chef by the name Imai was training to be a dentist. His entire family were dentists.. the familial pressure dial was turned up all the way. He felt to make his parents happy, this was the route he needed to go down.

He mentioned that every night he would stare at the ceiling and wonder if there was another path calling him… another life, another route.

Eventually he went down the road of cooking and at some point wandered towards making unique Japanese cuisine inspired Pizza.

I do sometimes wonder about my own life and career choices. I’ve been transparent before to you that I don’t think I’ll be operating all my life… and perhaps not even in 15 years time… I love medicine and I love surgery but do I want it to occupy my entire life? Is there something else out there for me to enjoy.. or several careers I need to enjoy?

Making educational material online is one career, certainly, but maybe the next step on is making interesting, thought-provoking documentaries.

Consider your ikigai, your why, your reason to wake up in the morning. Are you doing something you enjoy or making strides to get to that point? You don’t need to have one career in life and you also don’t need to be mired in the pit of the sunken cost fallacy where you feel trapped in one job, relationship, career just because you’ve invested lots of time.

Life Updates

I am currently writing this in the depths of sleep deprivation having finished my second night shift of a set of 3.

1 more to go and freedom and annual leave awaits!

This week is gearing up to be a busy one for me, despite my annual leave…. I’ve got 2 podcast episodes to record on Tuesday & Friday and sandwiched between those I’m recording the audio version of my book... yes I am narrating it and would have it no other way!

I live a very boring life so I am not going away anywhere on my days off… I will be in my favourite position in the world – on my couch with my favourite person, my monster Shadow.

Offsetting The Health Impacts Of Night Shifts..

There is no easy way around night shifts or any shift work that destroys your usual sleep schedule and the impact they have on your health aside from not doing those shifts.

Seeing as that’s not an attainable goal for many… these are my absolute basics to ensure night shifts don’t destroy me completely.

1. Wear sunglasses on the drive back home after the shift. You want to limit the light entering your eyes so you continue to suppress your alertness - so you can achieve a restful slumber

2. Keep a cool, dark environment in your room. I usually turn the fan or aircon on in my room for half an hour before I actually go to bed in the morning so it’s nippy when I sink into my sheets. I’ve also invested in some black out curtains (about 2 years ago) which is a total gamechanger; it dampens the outside noise and keeps my room pitch black.

3. Achieving silence. True silence is hard to achieve in our busy modern lives but using another noise as a distraction for more jarring sounds works well for me. Especially post night shift when sleep is hard to come by, I like using my fan as a source of “white noise” which helps to drown out the sounds of cars driving by in the road outside my room. Huge win.

4. Keep your mealtimes constant. When there are so many variables out of kilter during your odd shifts, it makes sense from a biological standpoint to keep some factors as a fixed constant. Mealtimes. I eat breakfast and dinner at the usual times (before and after my shifts) and if I’m very hungry I’ll have a light lunch after I’ve woken up around 3/4pm before my shift. Night shifts usually suppress my appetite thanks to that lovely low grade nausea anyway.

Ode To Bellybutton Fluff

Have you ever wondered why some people are cursed with more belly button lint than others?

Your body doesn’t actually produce lint or fluff but it is the consequences of tiny pieces of fibre breaking off from your clothing.

Normally these fibres brush off the skin and fall to the ground but if you are blessed with a dense abundance of stomach hair these fibres actually get caught and eventually they roll up into the belly button where it combines with sweat, dead skin cells, oil and bacteria to create biological recycled micro clothing – lint. Enjoy.. and clean your bellybuttons!