Instead of waiting 2 hours.....

[Laconic]

Today when I got home from work I was starving and scoffed my chicken stew and Broccol and tested 15 minutes later result 6.7 just wanted to see how high my Sugar levels get.
Is this level ok and is testing like this important or pointless....

 

[zoombapup]

The common method is to test at around 2 hours after eating. But it depends a lot on the person and the food eaten. Some foods release their glucose quickly, others take hours to release. So testing at intervals is generally useful to catch your maximum rise for any particular food.

I generally try and wait between 1 and 2 hours, but don't really do that too strictly, just to add some variance in when I test so I catch rises more reliably.

 

[Dave W]

That level is pretty good, I'd be delighted with it. However if you had tested before eating and again about 2 hours later you'd have gained more of an insight into just how much that specific food impacts on your sugar levels. A test just 15 minutes after eating doesn't really prove much.

 

[Ralph-YK]

Well, a 6.7, on it's own is a perfectly reasonable figure. When you're talking about food, how much your BG has gone up matters. So you need to know the starting point (as a diabetic, might not be much lower than 6). Also, the peak could be reached longer than 15 minutes after eating.
You can test at 15 minutes if you want. Add a test at the other times as well. Keep a record, and you should get a good idea of what happens to your levels with different foods.

 

[Andy HB]

I guess testing 15 minutes after eating is almost the same as testing before eating.

The exception would be if you were testing every 15 minutes to identify the glucose spike. But you'd burn through very expensive test strips doing that! 🙂

 

[Eddy Edson]

Worth noting that the 2-hours-after-testing thing isn't supposed to find your peak levels. You're very likely to be higher at 1 hr than at 2 hours.

Guidance like "No more than 8.5 mmol/L two hours after eating" is intended just as a rough estimate of the kind of post-prandial level which is consistent with a daily average of <= 7.8 mmol/L, corresponding on average to an HbA1c of <= 48. It's not intended to say you should never be higher than 8.5 etc etc.

There's very very little precision to it.

Also worth noting that non-diabetics typically peak 30 - 45 min after eating, but obviously it depends on a bunch of things including the specifics of the meal.

And, the average peak for a non-diabetic according to the data I benchmark against is 8.0 mmol/L, with two-thirds being in the range 6.7 - 9.3.

So if you test an 30 min or an hour after eating and see a reading of 9+, it's completely within the expected range for non-diabetics.

I think people often get a bit too stressed about these things ...

 

[grovesy]

When wearing a Freestyle Libre I can see for me mostly that after 2 hours that is when the peak is over.

 

[Docb]

I have been measuring before breakfast and one hour after for the last few days. Its because I have been feeling not right for the last few weeks and wanted to get some sort of measure of where I was on the D scale.

I used the before and after breakfast measure because that is the best time to get at least some control over some major variables. Longest time since I last ate, readings taken at the same time of day, not confounded by the effect of exercise and probably most importantly, I have a "standard" breakfast with the carb intake being as near as dammit, a fixed amount. Yes, I am a creature of habit but I hope not boring.

What I have seen is that currently, I get a post-breakfast increase of between 4 and 5 mmol/l. Doing a bit of jiggery pokery on my data set suggests that up until the end of January this had been consistently hovering between 2 and 3.5 for the last few months.

Conclusions... something is going on but I don't know what and measuring the increase at a fixed time after a standard meal might be useful as an indicator of something.

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

I agree with the general feedback that at 15 minutes only the fastest-hitting carbs will be showing.

So it depends what you are hoping your post-meal results will show you? The peak BG that the meal gave? Or a 2hr result to check that it’s mostly below 9?