Fasting / Ketosis & Blood sugar levels

[aelephant]

Just a quick question here. I tried to Google this but everything that came up was regarding Diabetes.

In a healthy individual fasting or on a ketogenic diet (very low carb), what do blood sugar levels look like? If this was posted on the site somewhere else and I missed it, I apologize.

I'm curious because of a recent post on LessWrong about Willpower. The author of a popular new book claims that Willpower is associated with blood sugar levels (higher levels of sugar, more willpower) and I'm curious how that connection would function in someone on a very low carb diet or fasting.

As a personal anecdote, I feel incredibly motivated fasting all morning and eating only eggs and butter for lunch.

[aelephant]

So there is certainly a trade-off here.

If your blood sugar is too high for too long it can damage just about every body system.

This study had some cool data:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18635428

BLUE is low-carb
RED is low-fat
YELLOW is Mediterranean diet







Fasting glucose was about 91 at the beginning in about all groups, so low-carb diet doesn't seem to have any negative effect on fasting glucose.

Low-carb diet had positive effects on :

- Insulin resistance (lowered HOMA-IR)
- Adiponectin (inversely correlated with body fat percentage in adults, the more Adiponectin you have, the less fat you are)
- Fasting insulin (lower insulin levels reduce hunger)
- C-reactive protein (lower levels indicate lower levels of inflammation)