Your health depends on your blood sugar levels...

Today's post: Monday, 3-3-2008

Every part of your body depends on proper blood flow to operate well. And, some parts can be harmed if your tiniest blood vessels, your capillaries, rupture or swell up too much.

Excessive blood sugar levels in your blood both cause that kind of capillary damage & can shut off blood circulation to key body parts.

Excessive blood sugar levels in your blood also tend to build up unstable plaque on your blood vessel walls. So, in addition to slowing blood flow & often causing high blood pressure, sometimes the plaque breaks loose. That causes heart attacks, strokes, & other life threatening & life taking events. People with high blood sugar levels get two to four times as many of such events than people with Ok levels.

The bad news is that your blood sugar levels may be too high right now as you read this.

The good news is that you can get your blood tested to find out if that’s the case. And, if it hasn’t gone too far, you can reverse the problem.

So, the most important thing is to get your blood glucose levels checked every 6 months or a year.

The other key thing is to follow the practices that keep your blood levels where they should be all the time.

Why be forced to reverse something after it’s started to harm you or be forced to take expensive drugs that only partly solve the problem & have side effects when you can prevent the problem in the first place?

Chances are many of you reading this haven’t gotten your blood sugar levels tested at all or within the past year.

So, make a strong effort to work with your doctor to have your fasting blood glucose & HBA1C levels checked soon -- & then at least once a year.

(Soon you will be able to test the more important of these two, your HBA1C levels, yourself. Bayer bought Metrika that was selling a self test HBA1C device to doctors to send home with their patients. Sometime in 2008 --- this year, they expect to release an Over the Counter Version.)

So you know how to read the results, your fasting glucose ideally should be 89 or a bit less. Between 90 & 100 suggests you probably need to exercise more & eat better. Between 101 & 119 means that it is imperative that you do so. And, over 120 means your doctor may well be advised to also put you on medication & most will do so.

HBA1C is even more important. Since it measures the sugar on your red blood cells which tend to die off & get replaced every two or three months, it is a superb & extremely accurate reading of your average blood sugar over the past two or three months.

This reading should be 5.7 or a bit lower. 5.8 or 5.9 suggests you probably need to exercise more & eat better.

6.0 to 6.2 is borderline type II diabetes which means that it is imperative that you do so. Some doctors will also prescribe a drug & classify you as diabetic at that level. So, if you take prompt action at lower levels, you can avoid this level of reading. And, if you get a reading of 6.0 to 6.2, & take massive action immediately, you can stay off drugs.

At 6.3 to much higher, you are in serious trouble; & your doctor will be well be advised to also put you on medication & almost all of them will do so.

To repeat, high blood sugar levels will do you serious harm from putting you on kidney dialysis to blindness to impotence to amputation of your feet to death by heart attack or stroke.

You can’t be safe if you don’t know what your levels are by getting them tested.

And, you can’t keep the levels in the safe zone unless you do regular exercise each week, ideally including strength training & eating right.

Eating right means eating much less sugar than the average person now does; never drinking soft drinks; never or almost never eating foods containing high fructose corn syrup; eating almost no refined grain foods at all; & eating lots of low starch vegetables; health OK protein; & some health OK fats each day.

This style of eating has a very low glycemic index & glycemic load. It tends to give you a smooth un-spiky flow of blood sugar & keep your body able to regulate itself with small amounts of insulin.

That lifestyle results in optimal to pretty safe levels of blood sugar.

And, if you have been eating the other way & not exercising, switching permanently to this life style will slash most of your excess fat off your body with it never to return.

You can also move your blood sugar a bit lower with 200 mg a day or a bit more of alpha lipoic acid.

You can also eat a teaspoon a day or so of cinnamon as a spice &/or almost every time you do allow yourself sugar. Another way to get cinnamon is to take the CinnamonForce supplement from a company called New Chapter.

But suppose you already eat better than most people & get regular exercise already. Is it still important to get your blood sugar readings regularly?

I can tell you YES, definitely !! from personal experience.

Before I learned this info, I was in that category. Mercifully when I got my cholesterol levels checked that I knew then to do, my doctor included fasting glucose. Mine was 115. Given my lifestyle, that was dangerously high.

I immediately switched back to no sugar added applesauce from the sugared applesauce I was eating; cut the amount of added sugar I was eating by about 60 percent; & began taking 200 mg a day of alpha lipoic acid. I also continued eating right otherwise & exercising. I was lucky. My readings since have been lower than 89.

I’ve also added more raw broccoli & cauliflower to my weekday lunches since then to help me lose some fat I wanted to get rid of. (These foods also prevent cancer about 10 times better than the cooked kind.)

My point is that no matter what, you do need to get your blood sugar levels tested regularly.

If you don’t, it’s about as safe as driving at normal speed on the freeway without being able to see where you are going.

To put it mildly, this is NOT a good idea.