Chris McAtomney

Red meat consumption is commonly perceived as being a significant risk factor for chronic disease and colorectal cancer.

The reality is that much of that risk has a lot to do with what kind of red meat, how you cook it, what you eat it with, and your overall fitness profile and inflammation status.

And if you get savvy about these nuances, you can significantly skew the risk:benefit ratio in your favour.

The most interesting insight that my CGM experiment yielded was that CGMs aren’t very useful for people without diabetes.

I’d hoped to identify which foods, training styles, supplements caused pronounced deviations outside my fasting blood glucose levels. And it turns out, as you’d expect- oats, potatoes, bread, all caused a rise. But being extremely insulin and glucagon sensitive, any deviation was rapidly corrected.

The only other standout was that my BGL regulation was a fraction looser after a night of restless sleep (as expected).

The key takeaway?

Unless you have diabetes, you don’t need a device to tell you what’s causing insulin resistance. We already know what drives it- poor sleep, sedentarism, unmanaged stress, and excess consumption of calorie dense high GI foods.

Most people assume their blood sugar is fine.
They’ve just never actually measured it.

I’ll be running a CGM for the next 10 days.
Meals, sleep, stress, training.

I’ll be using MacroFactor to log everything I eat and drink, so I can overlay a time stamped diet diary onto my CGM data.

Not looking for perfection.
Just seeing what’s actually going on under the hood.

I’ll share what shows up.

Iron deficiency isn’t always an intake problem.

You can be eating iron-rich foods… even supplementing… and still not move the needle.

Because absorption is regulated.

When inflammation is present, the body raises hepcidin and effectively blocks iron from being absorbed and released from storage.

From a survival standpoint, that makes sense.

From a modern lifestyle standpoint… not so much.

Poor sleep, chronic stress, sedentary, alcohol, and ultra-processed diets high in wheat and refined sugar…

All keep that signal switched on.

So if your iron isn’t improving, it’s worth asking:
Is it really a lack of iron… or is the brake still on?

If there’s one domain where binary thinking won’t get you very far, it’s health.

Nor will dogma or idealism. We all (even me) have our preconceived notions of what’s great versus what gives us the ick.

But more often than not, those notions are based on sentiment and emotion, when in fact they should be based on context and data.

The key message- tools, foods, medications… they’re almost never good or bad.

And if you’re asking that, it suggests you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve.

To know what the best tool for the job is, first, define the job.

And if you’re not sure, that’s when it’s worth speaking to someone who can help you find out.