Another day and some interesting observations

 I only have the blood sugar monitor for 14 days in total so I'm anxious to get the most out of it while I can.  Comparing dinner on Saturday and Sunday gave some food for thought.  I'd bought a pork tenderloin fillet and we had half each day (that's a quarter for me and a quarter for Kath)  with different accompaniments

On Saturday I sliced it into medallions and stir fried it with mixed vegetables and egg noodles.  As a sauce I knocked a mix of soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, ginger, garlic and a teaspoon of honey (yum!).  A couple of hours after eating it I got quite a steep blood sugar spike.

On Sunday I roasted the other half of the tenderloin and ate it with a few spuds, some spring greens and some leeks sweated with a knob of butter, a few small slices of chorizo and some creme fraiche and mustard stirred in.  (Yum again!)  After eating that the blood sugar graph showed a much gentler rise than the previous day.  Good news because I particularly like leeks done that way.

The question is why the difference?  Could it be the little bit of honey or the carbs in the noodles making the spike on Saturday? I can't tell.  My money is on the noodles.  What I should really do is change only one thing and then I can attribute any effect to that.  

I made the same error over breakfast.  One day I ate yoghurt, fruit, kefir and a sprinkling of All Bran for crunch.  Next day I omitted the fruit but doubled up on the All Bran.  Blood sugar wise it didn't make too much difference.  Again I would have learned more if I had changed one thing rather than two.  Maybe the extra All Bran has about the same sugar as the fruit. 

I also got quite a big spike yesterday after my lunch sandwich of home made sourdough with some blue cheese, lettuce and a bit of sauerkraut.  BTW making sauerkraut is ridiculously easy and cheap -just cabbage and salt. It really only takes ten minutes to make (then a couple of weeks to ferment.)  This was from my first ever attempt and it tastes pretty good.  The most likely cause of the spike is I think the bread even though it was quite high in fibre.  Today I had 30% less bread (this time as toast) and had a poached egg with it and my peak is  a tad lower and gentler in slope.  I really enjoy my sourdough but perhaps I'll think about eating smaller slices or not having it every day.

Every day Zoe feeds a few new lessons on the app.  They take about ten minutes each to read through.  Today there was a good one one about poo!  Actually it was very interesting because your poo can tell you a lot about your gut health and the make up of bacteria in your gut.  Do you know about the Bristol stool scale?  Google it. Part of my initial questionnaire was to rate my poo on that scale.  Then of course I had to send a sample off to the lab.  Apparently from that they can identify which of 30 different key types of bacteria are in my gut. They set that against a database of foods which either feed or hinder these particular bacteria, which will give me a guide about what foods I ought to eat or avoid.  I hope to get my results in a couple of weeks or less.

The other lesson today was about the gut microbiome itself and what can affect it.  Did you know that people that have pet dogs and cats have improved gut microbiomes? Fancy that.  Even the people you mix with can affect it. Also things like stress and exercise affect it as well as what you eat.  Apparently even identical twins only share about 34% of the same gut bacteria.  We're all different, which is part of the reason for all this testing and the personalised results.  What I didn't fully realise is these good bacteria also have an effect on your blood sugar and energy profile, how you deal with fats, your immune system, production of vitamins in the body and so much more. So you get the idea they are pretty important.

Well that's it for today.  I'm cooking a liver and bacon casserole with some mash and runner beans this evening -my choice not Zoe's, the idea is to test things you normally eat.  Let's see what that does.

You may well be thinking that all this is a lot to be doing, but it's not really.  Logging the food only takes a couple of minutes after each meal, then using the sensor only takes ten seconds and reading the lessons takes a total of about 20 mins a day.  Of course there's preparing the meals, but I'd be doing that anyway.  I enjoy cooking.  

Don't read too much into the meals I'm doing. I'm far from a culinary paragon. Do I ever eat junk food or ready meals?  Sure. Fish and chips, occasional takeaway curries, even McDonalds if I'm travelling.  Mostly though we do cook from scratch at home.  This Friday we have a special treat, our Peter is going to treat us to a meal and Brown's Restaurant in Cambridge and I'm going to have (for the first time in my life) lobster thermidor!  The graph might be interesting after that.