[chx]

I had some ideas on how unreliable all nutrition research is but nothing prepared for the flood of bad advice once I was diagnosed with diabetes T2. I now trust one thing and one thing alone and that's my Dexcom G6. If it shows a spike eating the same meal twice , that meal is off the list. That easy. I deleted normal flour, potatoes and rice from my life and per three month blood checks I do not even count as prediabetic now. (Of course, the system is still very much not okay: I ate a slice of brown bread in Vienna thinking it might be okay, it wasn't okay. Luckily, I am not getting seizures from it, phew!)

It must've been really, really hard navigating this minefield without it. Speaking of minefields, grocery stores are one. There's sugar in everything the sugar industry made Americans into sugar addicts, it's absolutely shocking and horrifying just how much of it is in bloody everything.

As wonderful a medical innovation dexcom is, their website is absolutely terrible. I am Canadian but I run an AT&T SIM because it's cheaper -- in 2018, AT&T removed North American roaming restrictions, they know and they are fine with us using it 100% in Canada. Now, the Dexcom app uses the gsm.sim.operator.iso-country Android system property to determine which country you are in. If it finds US then it registers you to https://uam1.dexcom.com/ otherwise https://uam2.dexcom.com/. There's absolutely no way to user select this. However, the browser uses IP geolocation... because of course it does. So you can't log into your own account unless you figure the above uam discrepancy out and manually go to the correct one. And for Canadians there is a store account which is neither of the above. It's an independent third. Because of course it is. There's nothing on the dexcom website or app which would mention any of this and their tech support won't say either. It's been a nightmare trying to figure it out.

[safog]

Is there a way to get this device without a prescription? I tried phone apps that use the FreeStyle Libre and make it into a CGM (e.g., https://www.levelshealth.com/).

They're great but also super expensive.

[saurik]

(Merely as I was curious last year about the effect various foods had,) I just ordered all the equipment on Amazon (though, it probably helps that I dated a type I diabetic for many years and have another type I friend that uses the Dexcom and so I knew everything I needed to get).

[imtringued]

What? It is pretty well established that continuous glucose monitoring is the go to method for avoiding potentially invasive diabetes and heart related surgery.

Diabetes, obesity and heart disease are often caused by excessive amounts of glucose in the bloodstream which causes your body to react to this emergency by spiking insulin which crams all the glucose into your fat cells and if those are full into your muscle and organ cells. At some point there will be inflammation in your blood veins which leads to plaque blocking the blood stream. That's when your heart will struggle to pump blood through your body.

[mft_]

Total tangent, but having moved to Germany from the UK, one thing I can’t find is (what in the UK we’d call) granary or seeded bread. The Germans have lots of lovely bread… but even the dark brown stuff is very smooth with (I assume) refined flour and no major seed/grain content. This might explain your blood sugar spike from brown bread?

[chx]

Denns biomarkt does have a few specialized breads which are OK. Mainstream things are not. Why, I do not know. In North America, Carbonaut is the only one that works.

[buzzwordninja]

Try looking in Polish shop for that kind of bread.

[wjkohnen]

Have you tried Schwarzbrot?

[mft_]

Yes - fair point - we've tried that, and that's a counter-example to my generalisation. However, I'd discounted/forgotten it because the versions I've tried almost don't count as bread in my mind, as it's so seed-heavy that it doesn't have much structural integrity and falls apart very easily!

[kingcharles]

Looking back to when my father was alive with diabetes T2 in the late 80s/early 90s, nearly all the nutritional information turned out to be total bollocks. I would go as far as saying the information was seriously harmful. We still have a good way to go, but things are definitely night and day compared to 30 years ago.