[BriOnH]

For those that would like to participate, I believe it would be helpful if we could put the CRE to the test.

What is the CRE:
The CRE, according to Dr. Bernstien is when something that is a solid is put into your stomach, no matter what its nutritional makeup is, it will raise blood sugar. In his analgous examples he often uses rocks in the stomach to raise sugar.

What to eat for the test?
I am not sure. Suggestions? The bigger the better. It must have near to no carbs or protiens.

The guidelines:
I think it would be best to get your blood sugars as predictable as possible for at least 3 days prior to the test. If you can already do that you are ahead. We will give 2-3 hours for the test. I believe the test should also happen after skipping a meal, lunch preferrably.

At a highlevel, to be discussed here, the test would go like this:
an hour afer you would normally eat lunch, eat the food we decide on. Test your bgl and I suggest using diabuddies to record this. That way we can easily get the data from diabuddies to here via the 'post your diagrid to the Diabetes forums' button on the diabuddies diagrid page.

Every 20 minutes we test for 2 hours. Thats six tests total. Once we have that data we can look at the posts and draw our own conclusions that hopefully we can all agree on whether the CRE is real or not.

IF YOU CHOOSE TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS TEST YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR HEALTH. DIABETESFORUMS.COM AND DIABUDDIES.COM WILL NOT ASSUME -->ANY<-- RESPONSIBILITY LEGEL, CIVAL, OR OTHERWISE FOR YOU IF YOU CHOOSE TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS TEST.

[ladytaz]

Um. Just FURTHER proves what a "quack" that man is!! If EVERYTHING we put into our bodies makes our BG rise, then what's the freakin point of HIS ways of things?? and ROCKS?? ROCKS????? O.M.G. PUHHHHFREAKINLEEEEEEEZE! (I wanted to say something alot worse, but I held back!! LOL) And does he know the EXACT makeup of "said" rocks???? As we say here in the south ..... That man's done lost his EVERLOVIN mind and is slap stupd!!!

WTH has this got to do with Chinese food anyways?? (just curious! LOL)

[Harold]

Celery, no carbs no calories and you burn up like 2 calories for an average size stalk.

[BriOnH]

Originally Posted by ladytaz

Um. Just FURTHER proves what a "quack" that man is!! If EVERYTHING we put into our bodies makes our BG rise, then what's the freakin point of HIS ways of things?? and ROCKS?? ROCKS????? O.M.G. PUHHHHFREAKINLEEEEEEEZE! (I wanted to say something alot worse, but I held back!! LOL) And does he know the EXACT makeup of "said" rocks???? As we say here in the south ..... That man's done lost his EVERLOVIN mind and is slap stupd!!!

WTH has this got to do with Chinese food anyways?? (just curious! LOL)

I beg to differ. Please show some respect for the man. After all he does much more good, than bad in respects to helping diabetics.

Chines food reteraunts usually give you a HUGE portion. Because it's so huge thie makes the bgl rise because it expands the stomache. While the carbs in the chinese food itself will raise blood glucose, the point has more to do with the arguement of "eating anything, even rocks, will raise your bgl" because it expands the stomach.

Originally Posted by Harold

Celery, no carbs no calories and you burn up like 2 calories for an average size stalk.

Perfect choice. How much do you think we should eat for the study?

[Diana]

In his book he gives the example of a head of lettuce causing the CRE - so an amount of celery roughly equal in quantity to a head of lettuce? Or alternately, a lettuce?

[Emm]

Excellent idea!
Celery is probably a good choice so long as you all agree on the size / weight (and are there different types of celery?). I bet it would take a LOT of celery to do much!

I for one think Dr B is brilliant. I don't follow his low carb ideas, but I do 'lower' carb (under 100g per day) as this works rather nicely for me. I've learnt a lot from his site & books, he's one smart man and really knows his stuff where D is concerned.

When thinking of Dr B, don't only think of his low carb ideas - also remember he's the man that encouraged patient maintenance of diabetes (Some might remember when only doctors had BG testers...) He's done a lot for Diabetes and we have a lot to thank him for, regardless of whether we follow his way of eating or work something out for ourselves.

[HelenM]

Why not use lettuce as thats the example he gives. I would think its easier to eat a large quantity than celery and it has the advantage that some varieties available everywhere at all times of the year(celery is more seasonal).

[xMenace]

I believe this phenomenon does exist and have experienced it to some degree. This is a great idea, and I'd love to participate. Testing is the only way to find out these things, and it would be a great example of what any one of us could do on our own. If it works well, maybe we could do even more group testing.

I do have some issues though; here's my thoughts:

- pick a bunch of foods that behave the same and pick a weight: say 100gms of rabbit food or RF (celery, lettuce, spinach, whatever). Some food content guru do a list.

- bolus rates can balance out or compensate for poorly set basal rates: oftern basals are too low and boluses are too high. In this case you will see a rise in BGs and falsely attribute it to the RF. I suggest doing a baseline basal profile for the same period. Compare results of day 2 to day 1, not to a flat line.

- other foods and activities affect BGs too. Test days should be as similar as possible.

- meter variations exist. Testers should perform and include calibrations and meter brand.

[Harold]

Originally Posted by BriOnH

Perfect choice. How much do you think we should eat for the study?

Celery or lettuce sounds good, having some do one or the other would give better results. How much? It would have to be by weight and enough to give most people a feeling of something on their stomach and not too much since it's tough to eat either without something extra on them. I suppose a little salt would be okay. So if someone has a head available along with some scales please weigh a quarter head.

[grace girl]

I'm going to throw something at you to consider....throw it out if you choose, I won't be offended.
However, from my own experience, how a persons basal are reacting is going to dramatically affect this test.
How? by endo's orders I was taking a certain amount of lantus. During that time I could have made you a very long list of foods that I could consume at any time with NO affect on bg.
Forward after a few months of basal testing and tweaking....I still have a list of foods that have no affect, but the list is MUCH smaller than before. And some of the one's that now affect me really suprised me.
Just thought you might want to take this into consideration.

[soso]

A head of romaine (cos) lettuce is recorded as 20g carb less 13g fibre and one 11-12" stick of celery as 1.9 g less 1 g fibre

per 100g
romaine net carbs 2.28

per 100g celery net carbs 1.91

romaine might be easier as I hate raw celery

[soso]

just checked and a head of romaine is about 300-400 g and a big head of celery was 900 g

I recon I could eat about 200-300 g of either at a sitting as a max to my stomach capacity

ss

[jen_slc]

Well, good luck Brian et al, I would like to participate, but I don't think I can stuff that much rabbit food into me!!! You must not have anything on/with the lettuce/celery/whatever if you really want to attribute any effect to the food item, so no salt, no dressing, no toppings, no nothing. And I'm just not gonna do that, but I'm totally ready to see what you guys come up with, lol!

But like grace girl said, there is so much individuality in treating this disease, there are going to be multiple factors that could bias the results. Although you can do what you can to minimize some of them, as Xmenace has suggested, you're not really going to come up with anything solid. I know that's not the point, but even if you sort of see something that might be suggestive, how among us all can you really say, "it was the lettuce?"

I'm thinking about it too technically, I know. It is beneficial, at the very least, to get an idea of how this phenomenon might affect us personally, individually.

And what about water? Does it have to be solid food, or can you (we, if the item was water, I might actually participate) drink a liter of water or something?

[BriOnH]

How about 7g of celery for the test? According to soso's findings that would be about 7-11 inch 'sticks'. I believe salt wouldn't effect it.

At stated earlier. You need to prep for this test 3 days in advance. All variables should be controlled as possible prior to the 4th day on which the test will run. PLEASE read my first post which addresses individual variables. There will be some variables that throw off the data. That's science people, but we will get it close.

I will also get a couple of non d's as controls, but our experiment control[s] are your previous 3 day readings without doing this experiment at the time specified.

What we are looking for here is a decent poplution to complete the test so that we can trend the data.

Water is ok. Bernstien implies its only solids that cause this phenomenon.