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Blood glucose dynamics vary with economic provenance of meal

Smith, T.; Hamill, D.; Venn, B.

2024-11-22 nutrition
10.1101/2024.11.21.24317693 medRxiv
Show abstract

The dynamics of blood sugar response to ultra-processed foods have strong parallels to the effects of addictive drugs. We hypothesize that if glycemic response is indeed an important determinant of habit formation-and hence product demand-then the largest producers of proprietary commercial foods will have formulated their products accordingly. We continuous glucose monitor (CGM) data from free-feeding adults spanning 579 meal events yielding a pooled time series dataset with more than 24,000 observations. We find strong evidence that addiction-like dynamic properties of the glycemic response (dose, rate of absorption, and withdrawal) are greater for globally branded fast food meals as compared to freshly-prepared or off-brand processed food meals. These differences are largely maintained when controlling for size of meal and nutrient content, suggesting that standard food labels may be insufficient to resolve what appears to be an important asymmetric information problem.

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