The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson,

and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

A primal look at gestational diabetes.

Every pregnant woman I've ever known has hated the oral glucose tolerance test.

Yet they still do it.

Drinking a tall glass of sickly sweet orange-flavored glucose water on an empty stomach is thoroughly disgusting.

What they're testing for is gestational diabetes mellitis, a variant of diabetes

characterized by pancreatic insufficiency during pregnancy. Sometimes it's a misdiagnosis.

Low-carb high-fat diets transiently increase insulin resistance. Moreover, pregnancy in general

throws glucose tolerance out of whack. Just like

a low-carb diet can induce insulin resistance to temporarily preserve glucose for the brain,

pregnancy induces insulin resistance to preserve glucose for the fetus. This made sense when glucose

was rarer, when you had to shimmy up a tree for honey or dig for

roots and tubers. In that metabolic milieu, a little insulin resistance during pregnancy was adaptive.

In today's environment, where at any given moment, you've got a million inexpensive glucose

calories within a five-minute drive, it can cause problems.

In babies, it can cause excessive birth weight, injuries from a rough birth,

low nutrient levels upon entry, and pre-term delivery.

In moms, increased type 2 diabetes risk, increased C-section risk,

increased risk of hypertension and preeclampsia,

and increased risk of miscarriage.

You have two options to test for it.

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