I meant total of 250mg spread throughout the day. Even one dose of 50mg gives me the worst smelling gas in the history of humankind. My wife said I had to choose between her or the acarbose, so I reluctantly gave up the latter. 
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Davin
I take Metformin but it isn’t helping to reduce glucose. Are you saying that Acarbose worked for you after taking carbs and sugar , I’m not overweight but not eating much due to lack of appetite and scared of food contains any sugar or carbs. . Can you elaborate please
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Hi Dee, I’m assuming you know that if you aren’t eating carbs then the acarbose won’t do anything. I actually didn’t test my postprandial glucose after taking acarbose with carbs, but judging by the gas I’m sure it was working, just not practical for me. If anything, if I decided to go low carb I could take the acarbose 3 times daily to keep me in line, since I’d then be afraid to eat carbs since I knew I’d have horrible gas afterwards.
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Thank you Davin for your quick response. Have you compared Acarbose to Metformin? I find Metformin gives me gas . If you have tried Metformin, what was the comparison?
In ITP study Dr. Miller has discovered that Acarbose exhibit longevity benefits. Is it clear from the study that the benefits were caused by only anti- carb effects of Acarbose or some other factors?
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Dr. Miller hypothesized that it was the blood glucose lowering effects behind the longevity benefit because they saw it in both acarbose and canagliflozin, but they aren’t sure. See discussion in this thread: Canagliflozin - Another Top Anti-aging Drug
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Hi Dee,
Metformin made me chronically nauseous when I tried it, but most people seem to do ok w/it, or they adapt to it and can eventually tolerate it with minimal side effects. They’re very different medications, so are very difficult to compare.
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Thank you David, I think I have an anxiety disorder that puts my glucose up because I really don’t eat carbs or sugar, in fact, Metformin takes my appetite away
Dee
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Some evidence that acarbose does more than just blunt glucose spikes:
Pointed out by Mike Lustgarten, Ph.D., on Twitter
“Butyrate, produced by the intestinal microbiota, is essential to maintaining host health by providing energy to the intestinal epithelium, modulating the immune system, and affecting diverse metabolic routes throughout the body, e.g., in the liver and the brain (1, 2). Depletion in butyrate-producing taxa has been linked to several emerging noncommunicable diseases, such as type 2 diabetes (T2D) (3), obesity (4), and cardiovascular disease (5), and was shown to facilitate establishment of enteric pathogens by disrupting colonization resistance”
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I like to think that acarbose makes normal starches behave like resistant starch in our body. The benefits of resistant starch are already well appreciated.
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I am pre diabetic and eat very little , probably because I take metformin and 2 other glucose reducing pills, I was hoping that Acarbose might be more powerful so I could eat food I like but from your message I don’t think there is much difference
Thank you for your help
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Thank you for the article. The article is from 1997. Are you aware of any other studies confirming that acarbose has other positive effects besides possibly reducing postprandial glucose spikes? (Does not work for me.)
Considering that Richard Miller discovered it’s antiageing effect, especially when combined with Rapamycin, would it make sense to take it regularly, not only with meals containing starch?
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would be interesting to see a study looking at dietary acarbose+carbohydrate supplementation to achieve x amount of butyrate in the colon compared to resistant starch supplementation to achieve comparable levels of butyrate, and see if health/anti-aging benefits are similar. Otherwise, it’s going to be difficult if not impossible to untangle acarbose’s glucose-spike-lowering effect vs butyrate effect on longevity.
We really don’t have the research yet to make an informed decision on this yet. Acarbose is relatively cheap, and depending on your diet (i.e. if you avoid wheat products when taking acarbose) then the side effects (in my experience) are not too bad. If you have a lower starch meal I think the side effects are generally nil. So, there doesn’t seem to be a significant downside to taking acarbose with every meal, other than the cost. There is some potential for blood glucose levels going down too far, so something to watch for, but it doesn’t seem like that is a big issue for most people.
So - from a risk / reward perspective (for me at least) I think that taking acarbose regularly is probably ok. Others may weigh the risk/reward differently.
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Thank you. Will watch for a new data, but considering that this is an old and generic medication, a new research is not very likely.
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When Acarbose was uniformly mixed through a ground rice meal prior to digestion it produced dose-dependent reductions in the postprandial glucose, insulin and GIP responses which were evident at doses as low as 12.5 mg. The responses to whole brown rice were intermediate between those to 12.5 and 25 mg Acarbose in ground brown rice. In tablet form Acarbose was only one quarter as effective in flattening the post prandial glucose and insulin responses as it was in powder form
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Now the question for the ITP is…
How stinky were the acarbose mouse farts?
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Many people chew /crush the acarbose tablets when they take them for this reason.
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Wow. they taste weird but not metformin-level weird
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A recent post included a link to research saying the body develops resistance to acarbose causing it to have diminishing effects. Some responses included people saying they might only use it with high carb meals and not every meal.
I’ll try to track it down. Let’s see how good our search function is…
EDIT: The research (included below) does not suggest diminishing effects.