Uncover the science behind glucose dips, the sneaky culprits that trigger your insatiable urge for snacks, especially the sweet and fatty ones.

Click to listen to the audio…

Conquer Cravings: Understanding Glucose Dips and Taking Control! 

Uncover the science behind glucose dips, the sneaky culprits that trigger your insatiable urge for snacks, especially the sweet and fatty ones.

You’re a snacker !  You wish you weren’t, but you JUST CAN’T HELP YOURSELF. Every couple of hours you find yourself raiding the fridge looking for something to eat.

You’re hungry for NICE THINGS.

The sweeter and more fattening the better.

Addressing the snacking habit

When it comes to dealing with your snacking habit.  Health guru will look you up and down, like you’re something the cat dragged in and admonish you to just STOP SNACKING.

You would if you could !

You feel ashamed.  Angry.  Frustrated. Defeated.

What if I told you, it really isn’t DIRECTLY your fault….

Eating decisions

The decision to eat is determined by

• social,
• psychological and
• physiological factors.

Unfortunately attempts to FIX SNACKING PROBLEMS typically focus on psychology.  These  strategies can work.  It is possible to PERSUADE yourself NOT TO SNACK using psychology.  For most people, it’s HARD to do and only works  in the short term, because psychology is seldom the dominant factor.

Physiological factors are.

One physiological factor that can spark a feeding frenzy is a GLUCOSE DIP.

Dipping into sugar dips

The idea of glucose dips is not new.  Colloquially  “glucose dips” are often blamed for calorie indiscretions,  but their physiological existence in ordinary healthy people has been questioned.  But anyone taking insulin as a therapy, will KNOW the horrendous feelings that go hand in hand with a GLUCOSE CRASH.

The official signs and symptoms :

• Dizziness,
• Tremor,
• Sweating,
• Heart palpitations,
• Personality changes, which is a nice way of saying you become grumpy and aggressive,
• Confusion,
• Bizarre behaviour.  I once saw my Dad polish off the skin of an avocado.

In the case of someone experiencing an insulin “overdose”….

A man made sugar crash

If  they don’t get glucose into their system FAST, loss of consciousness follows.   THINK diabetic coma.

Of course, this response is not NORMAL, it is a drug induced adverse effect.  And the reason it plays out is  because the normal physiological responses have been over ridden by the exogenous “insulin”.

But truth be told…………

Hyperinsulinemia pushing the envelope

Too much endogenous “insulin” can trigger a wild ride and cause a spectacular dip,  but collapsing in a heap on the floor won’t happen, EVER !

The brain will dispatch a rescue team.

The tail end of that emergency response is the autonomic meltdown I described earlier.  The chemical driving this is adrenaline. But long before this happens the brain will already have initiated “damage” control.  One of the first things it does,  is it tells you to GO GET SOMETHING TO EAT.

The command to EAT

On paper the SOMETHING could be anything….

• An apple
• A handful of nuts
• A piece of cheese

Most of the time the snack will be something FULL of carbs.  Aka a sugar gremlin moment.  The official scientific name for THE SNACK ATTACK is  subclinical reactive hypoglycemia.

Under the radar

It’s subclinical because it actually flies under the radar.  You don’t KNOW it is happening.  But it is real.  And it’s connected with the  snacking habit.

And for the most part, it flies UNDER THE RADAR of the medical establishment too…….

When it comes to tracking glucose levels the focus is on what happens in the first two hours after a meal.

High glucose is A PROBLEM

When glucose levels in the first two hours are TOO HIGH, alarm bells sounds.  When they’re high “enough” your doctor calls for pharmacological help.   Drugs like metformin, GLP mimetics etc.

Since glucose dips are unlikely to happen inside of the two hour window they’re not even noticed.

Glucose levels tracked for an extended period of time. © 2021 Patrick Wyatt et al

Low glucose is A PROBLEM

When glucose dips happen, they typically happen somewhere around the three hour mark, a time period when glucose levels are not routinely checked.   And if when they are using random finger pricks, it is pretty unlikely hypoglycemic events will be “picked” up.  The measurement is a MOMENT in time and selecting THE MOMENT is like picking the winning lotto numbers.

But thanks to technology, the ability to track glucose beyond the two hour mark is becoming more routine.  Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) devices can and do pick up glucose dips on a routine basis.

A common problem

This is what a team of Japanese researchers discovered when they  tracked glucose levels in NON-DIABETIC males, aged 50-65 years, they found that 50 % of them, experienced blood glucose below 70 mg/dl (3.9 mM) during the 24 hours after an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT).

And for a quarter of them, the time in the hypoglycemic range was more than 55, 4 min.

That’s a significant amount of time.  And it does have consequences on appetite/meal frequency.

Creating NEW problems

A paper by a British team did a good job capturing this, when they analysed postprandial glucose, appetite and energy intake in 1070 UK participants, following an OGTT and a variety of standardized meals. The team looked for and quantified any glucose dips happening in the  2-3 hour mark.

Based on their average glucose dip level, the individuals were dropped into one of four “buckets”.

The relatively big sample size allowed them to see patterns across the quartiles. The BIG dippers definitely got the munchies.  They felt hungrier.

Graph showing change in hunger in the lowest and highest glucose dip quartiles. © 2021 Patrick Wyatt et al

And they did something about it.  They ate their next meal sooner and ate a little bit more. In a 24 hour period they ended up eating more calories.

Postprandial measures by top and bottom quartiles of 2-3h Glucose Dip. The participants with the largest dips (Q4) are compared to those with the smallest dips (Q1) according to time until the next meal, ad libitum Energy Intake 3-4h immediately after the end of the fasting period, and ad libitum Energy Intake over 24h. © 2021 Patrick Wyatt et al

Not a lot more………  But a few extra calories, day in and day has a habit of showing up.  And those extra pounds can become a health risk.

So why do glucose dips happen ?

It’s speculated that it has something to do with glucose effectiveness.  This is the uptake of glucose that happens independent of insulin. Insulin only controls sugar access for a very select group of cells which have the GLUT4 gate.  Insulin responsive cells included liver, muscle and fat cells.

Thanks to biology some folks are a lot better at using glucose and inhibiting the production of glucose by the liver.

NOTE : Glucose effectiveness can be estimated using data collected from an OGTT.  It’s a doozy of a calculation. This paper  will walk you through it, if you want to take a look. 

Low glucose effectiveness

When you’re out and out diabetic – you “suck at it”.  But, before you get there, you might actually be very good at it.  Too good  !   Your super power creates a vulnerability.

A conceptual diagram of the role of subclinical hypoglycemia-induced appetite depending on the levels of glucose effectiveness. © 2023 Ichiro Kishimoto

As you brain works super hard to protect you from life threatening glucose crashes, you spend your days GRAZING. You get caught on the sugar gremlin roller coaster because SNACKING BEGETS SNACKING.

How can you stop glucose dips  ?

A sensible logical  suggestion is to SNACK LESS.   Unfortunately  it’s a suggestion few people can follow so it  just creates negative emotions.

SNACKING is  not a CHOICE it’s a NECESSITY.

To “fix” the problem, you need to work on SNACKING differently.  If we review the SCIENCE……

Triggering the munchies

Meal initiation is triggered by a fall in blood glucose and terminated by a rise in it.  A somewhat simplistic way of looking at this is  insulin is the hormone that drops glucose and glucagon is the hormone that increases glucose.

It’s a team effort.

And both sides of the “equation” can be managed.

More glucagon

In the case of glucacon, we can draw from the experiences of type 1 diabetics. When they experience a CLINICAL HYPOGLYEMIC event,  the pharmacological solution to the problem is a glucagon shot.

You can MIMIC a glucagon shot by including a small amount of protein in your meal.

Less insulin

In the case of insulin, it’s release is primarily triggered by eating carbs.  To lower the amount of insulin circulating, you want to CUT your carbs.  The goal is not to go zero carb per se, just keep the number within a range your body can handle.  For most people this is somewhere around 20 – 30 grams of carb in one sitting.

Obey  the RULE OF THIRDS

If you want to minimize glucose dips after eating you need to  include a little carbs, a little protein and a little fat EVERYTIME YOU EAT.

Breakfast, lunch, dinner and SNACKS.

If you’re metabolically challenged, this is the place to start.  It’s one of the central tenets of the CANDY FLOSS system.   You can learn more about it in the  FREE Willpower Report.

Further reading

Want to discover more ways to create BETTER BODY CHEMISTRY ?