Hey guys, it's Michael Kummer, and in today's video, I want to show you how physical activity or
inactivity can influence how your body responds to the consumption of carbohydrates. Before we
get started, make sure to subscribe to this channel and you click on the
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If you have been following my channel, you probably remember a video I did a while ago where
I teamed up with Levels health, the maker of the continuous glucose monitoring platform that I've
been using. This guy here, continuous glucose monitor, where we try to find out if physical
activity in the form of going for a 30-minute walk, could influence how my body responds to the
consumption of a can of Coke, which is loaded with sugar and carbohydrates, as you know.
Among all of the participants of that experiment. I was the only one were going for a walk or
performing some sort of physical activity for 30 minutes, post-Coke consumption did not improve
my blood sugar response. So for everyone else, they showed lower blood sugar levels.
They showed improved glucose response by just going for a 30-minute walk. In my case,
I did a bike ride for thirty minutes. This should be roughly the same as a 30-minute walk
and my blood sugar response, just sitting around, not doing anything after drinking
that can of Coke was actually better than on the day where I went for that bike ride.
And so this was odd and I thought, well, maybe I'm just a weirdo who reacts differently than everyone
else. And so I wanted to repeat this experiment, but instead of drinking that piss water again,
which I absolutely did not want to do, I decided to do it with a type of food
that is in fact part of my regular diet. And that is raw honey. I consume raw honey
several times a week. And so I decided I'm gonna redo this experiment and extend it a little bit
by consuming two tablespoons of raw honey during certain times around workouts. So for example,
I did a, I consumed honey and went for a 30-minute walk.I consumed honey right before a bike ride,
before strength training, before a HIIT workout like CrossFit.
I consumed honey between strength and the HIIT workouts right in between. I did it at the end
of the workout. And so I wanted to, to try and find out how those, you know, timing the honey,
timing does carbohydrates would impact my blood sugar and my response to, you know,
removing the blood sugar from my blood. And just to set the stage a one tablespoon
of honey contains, or at least the one that I consumed contains 18 grams of carbs
out of which there are 16 grams of sugar and the sugar is roughly a 50-50 split of
glucose and fructose. So by consuming two tablespoons of that, honey, I had 32 grams
of sugar or 36 grams of carbohydrates with each experiment. And that is roughly the same
as the amount of sugar in that can of Coke. I think it's the Coke a little bit more
than the honey, but for the sake of this experiment that was perfectly fine.
Now I printed out the list of experiments here and the first
one was honey plus a 30-minute walk. The second one was HIIT workouts or
CrossFit followed by consuming the honey. The third one was biking to the CrossFit workouts,
performing strength training, performing, consuming the honey performing the HIIT workouts,
meaning the metabolic conditioning, and then biking back home. The fourth one was consuming
and sitting in front of the computer for two hours, not doing anything. The fifth one was
consuming the honey immediately followed by biking to the gym and performing the
HIIT workout. And then the sixth one was the strength training followed by honey followed by
HIIT workout without any biking involved. And so these are the experiments I performed,
and as you can see here the graph and the corresponding numbers indicate
the increase in blood sugar in milligrams per test compared to my baseline. So the baseline I took
right before consuming the honey. And then again, I looked at the
increase and looked at the spike. What was the highest number within the next 90
to 120 minutes? And that's the number that I used to calculate then the increase. And if you look at
those numbers, you see something very interesting. The first thing that stuck out to me was, again,
the comparison of honey, plus a 30-minute walk with honey, plus no activity and trust based on
the increase, the absolute number than honey plus no activity wins,
meaning that my blood sugar response is better. If I consume carbs or honey and sit around,
not doing anything versus going for a walk.
And while this is very much in line with the Coke experiment that I've done before,
it's still odd because it, it, it kind of doesn't make sense. You know, if you, if you walk,
if you do anything physically if you're physically active, then your body uses or requires some
glucose to fuel the muscles and everything. And so you would think. The body would use
some of that glucose very quickly and thus lower your, your spike, but it's not the case. And it,
it didn't make sense to me. Some other experiments kind of made sense, like, you know, consuming the
honey right after I HIIT workout. That's where my BA my body is depleted.
In glyco trends are typically in also for your information. When I perform a CrossFit workouts,
even if I don't eat anything before or after my blood sugar always spikes. And that is because
performing a high intensity workouts requires my body to use fuel or use glucose to a degree
for energy. And because I always work out in a fasted state, my body doesn't have any dietary
glucose or anything else to, to use as fuel. So it starts dumping glycogen. Glycogen is the
storage mechanism of glucose combined with water in the liver and in muscle tissue. And so when I
work out and my body starts dumping glycogen to make the glucose available for my, for my cells
to use for energy, I see a spike every time. And that spike is typically, you know, it, it can go
up to like the 170-180 milligrams per deciliter. So massive spikes I've seen just doing CrossFit.
And so with that in mind, you know, adding in honey doesn't completely changed it. I mean,
it might lower the overall increase a little bit, but it's very difficult to understand.
How much of that spike is from the workout versus from the honey,
so that's why I didn't pay too much attention. I didn't try to read too much into those
you know, different really four experiments involving high-intensity workouts, because
I don't know exactly, you know, where the dump came and where it spike came from a workout or
the honey. Probably a combination of both. To what degree? I have no idea. But interestingly, still,
if I do a HIIT workout, plus honey and cycling strength, honey HIIT workout and cycling.
My blood sugar increase was relatively low unsurprisingly because at that point, really
my body already had already started demanding glycogen. So I gave it some honey. And it fulfills
those needs probably partially by the honey, so my body didn't have to dump as much glycogen.
And so the overall spike was lower than maybe in some other cases.
But interestingly enough, in the last experiment, strength, honey plus HIIT, I had a massive spike,
but this HIIT workout was so tough that I attribute that spike predominantly to the
HIIT workout and not so much to the honey. Now, if we look at just those numbers and if we ignore
maybe some of the HIIT workout or HIIT experiments for reasons I've already mentioned, it's still,
it, it leads to the conclusion that. At least in my case, not performing any physical activity
consuming carbohydrates is actually better for me because the spike is a little bit lower. Okay.
It's only one point lower. So we could say it's the same, it's equal, you know?
And that was the conclusion that I really came to when I when I punched in all of those numbers and,
you know, designed that graph here. That was my conclusion until yesterday. But
then I did something that it should've done from the beginning. I fired up the Levels. Health app.
And I'm going to show you that here. I'm going to see it here on the side, of the screen as well.
I brought it up and there is one neat feature in this app
that allows you to compare different. They call it zones, but it's different.
You know, measurements or time segments where you track events. Like, you know,
I log my food in there very often. Like all the honey experiments are locked in. So I have an
exact timestamp of when I consumed the honey when I did the workout, et cetera. And so,
once you have your logs, you can compare multiple of those log entries and overlay
them in a graph to see how the blood sugar response was during, in those different zones.
And so I compared the honey with a 30-minute walk and the honey with no activity
and the results were pretty amazing. Here. You can see that the white line is the honey plus
the walk. The green line is the honey plus no activity. And while you can see that, if you
compare here, the absolute, this is the ad need. You can look at it from an absolute numbers
perspective and relative. So, and really the relationship between those two.
If we look at the absolute numbers, you can see that yes, both costs a very similar spike,
but look at how dramatically the fall-off is for the white line, that is the honey plus walk. So,
by going for a walk, my body removed the glucose from my bloodstream significantly quicker.
And the line on the baseline goes back or to the recovery goes back even below baseline
in comparison to sitting around if. In that case, where it didn't do anything, no activity
my blood sugar remained up for significantly longer and it stayed there for a while and that's
a huge difference. You can even see the, the comparison is more stark here in the relative.
Where you can see, there's a huge difference between going for a walk after consuming honey
and sitting around. And this is amazing because I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have figured that out
by simply looking at the absolute numbers, they look kind of the same, you know,
and I could have concluded, well, it's all the same, you know, it doesn't really make
a difference, but looking at the comparison, looking at the fall off and the recovery.
That paints it in an entirely different picture. And so what are some of the lessons that I've
learned as well? I think the key lesson is that yes, doing something being physically active
after consuming carbohydrates, be it going for a walk, taking it bike right. Or doing.
Moderate intensity workout will have a significant impact, a positive impact on how your body
handles blood sugar, meaning how quickly it can remove it and how
quickly you can get, get back to baseline. Now with high intensity type of workouts,
that's not necessarily the case because if, if you work out hard enough, then your body will
likely start dumping glucose. And that will muddy the water here a little bit,
but there is obviously a difference between. Blood sugar, spike induced by food, and blood sugar,
spike induced by physical activity. They are not the same. So just because
you see a massive spike doing a CrossFit workout doesn't mean that's necessarily
bad for you. Plus those spikes typically recover very quickly. Because at that point,
the body is in dire need of glucose for fuels and removes that very quickly. That's only a train.
Increase. That is perfectly fine. What you don't want to have is, you don't want to have your
blood sugar up for extended periods. That's really where stuff starts getting bad. And in particular,
you know, once the blood sugar has been around in your bloodstream for a while, and the body says,
you know what, I don't really need it. So what are we going to do? Well, let's store it
for energy so we can use it later. And very often, unfortunately, that, especially if it's dietary
or diet-induced, It's not going to store it as glycogen. It's going to store it as fat. You know,
that's the storage mechanism of the body to store energy for when you might need it in the future.
The problem is in our modern lives. So we don't need that energy in the future because we only
we're going to have our next meal in a couple of hours likely, or the next morning, you know?
So bottom line here really is if you consume carbohydrates and there was
nothing wrong with consuming carbs, especially. if they are good and clean carbs from seasonal
fruits from raw honey, et cetera. Then it is beneficial. If you are physically active after the
consumption, go for a walk, go for a bike ride, do something, do jumping jacks, whatever it takes to
get your heart rate up a little bit to induce your body in using the glycogen for energy.
Or the glucose for energy instead of storing it as fat tissue. And that's really it. So that's
what I've learned. Wasn't really a complete surprise, but it was definitely interesting
to see the difference between one graph and the other, you know, it's always. You know,
data can be interpreted in many different ways, and it's always important to have some nuance and
to look at the context and to look at it from different angles to really find out what the
data is trying to tell you, instead of jumping to quick conclusions, that might be entirely wrong.
And so if you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. If you didn't like it,
let me know in the comments, what I could have done better. Until next time.