Why & how to control your blood sugar levels….
Today's post: Thursday, 1-8-2009
A. Why do it?
1. Your ability to think, remember, and even be you and know your friends and family depends on you doing so!
Over the past week or so there have been multiple stories in the online health news about how in several ways having your blood sugar spike too often or average too high or low a level harms your brain.
It seems that very low blood sugar makes you a bit confused & slow in your thinking. High blood sugar both directly causes your brain to create damaged areas from inflammation caused by the high level of blood sugar according a news article in that group; AND over time excessively high blood sugar damages your capillaries in all parts of your body. That in turn causes poor circulation to your brain which we have known causes age related mental decline; & recently it’s been found that this lack of circulation and the resulting UNDER-delivery of glucose to your brain cells all the time looks to cause the damaged areas in your brain that cause Alzheimer’s disease.
But it goes far beyond that if your blood sugar is always too high or spikes too often.
2. Your body’s blood sugar management system begins to malfunction in a way that results in even higher blood sugar levels and excessive levels of insulin that no longer works properly.
This process can go into a negative feedback loop that becomes hard to reverse. And, if that goes on too long, you get type 2 diabetes.
The drugs to manage that except for lower doses of Metformin tend to not work well and have obnoxious side effects, or to stop working; & some wind up causing other health problems.
This is expensive between the drugs and the extra doctor visits and causes poor quality of life and often doesn’t prevent the damage from the high blood sugar. That in turn can cause you to have problems getting health insurance.
So, it pays huge dividends to you to NOT go there.
3. If your insulin levels and blood sugar levels are high, your body adds extra fat, particularly on your waist.
So, if you control your blood sugar levels you are much less likely to gain fat weight; and you can lose it far more easily. Even better, the things to do to prevent high blood sugar levels tend to cause you to be trim and free of excess fat DIRECTLY because you wind up taking in less calories and burning more.
4. Then there are the other consequences of the damage excessively high blood sugar causes your capillaries in all parts of your body and the associated poor circulation.:
(It’s why doctors DO try to protect you if you get type 2 diabetes.)
Blindness from damage to your eyes and optic nerves.
More likely to get sick and get well less easily due to damage to your immune system and its ability to get its protective blood components to your cells.
Kidney damage and then the obnoxious to deadly consequences to you when they stop working well or at all to filter your blood properly.
Foot amputation and/or gangrene of your feet.
Much higher risk of heart disease, heart attacks, and other cardiovascular diseases such as erectile dysfunction.
The conclusion is that you can be well and have dramatically lower medical costs and quality of life and live far longer and be much trimmer lighter, better looking and sexier if you control your blood sugar.
B. How do you control your blood sugar and keep healthy circulation?
The strategic description is to get close to the kind of food and exercise people evolved to thrive on over millions of years and kept until 5,000 years ago & kept mostly until about 100 years ago.
Get moderate exercise that’s abundant; and some more intense efforts; and some fast moving that you need extra effort to do that you do regularly.
Eat food that’s mostly wild caught animals and fish, plants (mostly vegetables and some whole fruit), nuts, and very little whole grain and no or very, very little refined grains or sugar.
Two of our recent posts have more details on how to do this.:
“Interval cardio prevents senility THREE ways” from Monday, 12-29-2008.
& “3 key ways to keep your health” from Monday, 1-5-2009 earlier this week.
In short, you eat right & get regular exercise each week.
In addition to that, there are supplements that you can take that can help.
Chromium polynicotinate, alpha lipoic acid, & cinnamon definitely help; are safe in normal dosages; and have other health benefits.
And, there are some other supplements that have been shown to help but which I’m less familiar with in terms of their safety.
What about soft drinks and packaged snacks and refined grain breads and cereals and high fructose corn syrup and commercial baked goods and desserts?
It couldn’t be plainer. That stuff is about as safe to eat as arsenic as far has having healthy levels of blood sugar. Few people ate much of similar foods 100 years ago and no one did 5,000 years ago and for the millions of years before that. So, our bodies simply don’t handle them well even if we exercise a lot and not at all if we don’t get enough exercise.
C. Just like driving a car, you cannot control what you cannot see. So other than following a lifestyle that tends to prevent high blood sugar, how do you know if you already have high blood sugar or are doing enough to keep it low?
There are two tests that you can get that measure it.
1. One is a fasting blood sugar reading first thing in the morning.
OK readings are about 77 to 89 with readings in the middle or lower half of that range being ideal.
Readings in the 90’s, 90-99, begin to be dangerous and should be lowered a bit.
Readings in the 100 to 115 range mean you should take immediate and strong efforts to do more to bring them down. (Doctors didn’t used to know this. Mercifully, when I turned up with a reading of 113 once my doctor at the time DID know this; and I knew how to fix it. Now my readings tend to be in the higher 80’s.)
Readings in the 116 to 119 range are even worse and will tend to land you in type 2 diabetes and go UP if you don’t take immediate and massive action to bring them down.
120 and much higher will get you diagnosed as having type 2 diabetes.
2. But fasting blood sugar, though it tends to be accurate, is snapshot at a particular time. Your average blood sugar may be higher if you ate right and exercised a lot the day before. Or your average blood sugar may be lower if you were unusually sedentary and stuffed yourself with bad foods the two days before much more than you usually do.
So, it would be VERY valuable and MUCH more accurate if there was a way to measure what your average blood sugar level was over the last 60 to 90 days.
There IS such a test. It’s called the HBA1C test.
The way it works is that your red blood cells live about 60 to 90 days before your body replaces them with new ones. And, they carry glucose to your other cells and how much of this sugar they have on them can be measured.
OK readings for this one are about 5.1 to 5.7 with the middle to lower half being better.
Readings of 5.8 or 5.9 mean you should take immediate and strong efforts to do more to bring them down; and may tend to land you in type 2 diabetes and go UP if you don’t take immediate and massive action to bring them down.
Readings of 6.0 are right on the border of type 2 diabetes.
6.1 to 6.9 are diagnosed by doctors as low level type 2 diabetes and the better ones will allow you to make an effort to bring the level down and keep it from going up with the methods in this post, particularly if it’s in the 6.0 to 6.4 range.
Above that range, doctors tend to prescribe Metformin.
And, readings of 7.0 and up mean you are in trouble and will get your doctors attention and more drug prescriptions.
One of the best pieces of news I’ve seen in years is that a Silicon Valley company, Metrika, began to make a home tester for HBA1C which they sold to doctors to send home with their patients.
The more recent news is even better. Bayer bought Metrika and now calls it their
HBA1C division and the word is that early to mid-summer this year you’ll be able to buy one at your local drugstore with no prescription needed.
So, you can measure where your blood sugar is now with help from your doctor. And, by mid-June to late July this year, you can do it whenever you want.
Today's post: Thursday, 1-8-2009
A. Why do it?
1. Your ability to think, remember, and even be you and know your friends and family depends on you doing so!
Over the past week or so there have been multiple stories in the online health news about how in several ways having your blood sugar spike too often or average too high or low a level harms your brain.
It seems that very low blood sugar makes you a bit confused & slow in your thinking. High blood sugar both directly causes your brain to create damaged areas from inflammation caused by the high level of blood sugar according a news article in that group; AND over time excessively high blood sugar damages your capillaries in all parts of your body. That in turn causes poor circulation to your brain which we have known causes age related mental decline; & recently it’s been found that this lack of circulation and the resulting UNDER-delivery of glucose to your brain cells all the time looks to cause the damaged areas in your brain that cause Alzheimer’s disease.
But it goes far beyond that if your blood sugar is always too high or spikes too often.
2. Your body’s blood sugar management system begins to malfunction in a way that results in even higher blood sugar levels and excessive levels of insulin that no longer works properly.
This process can go into a negative feedback loop that becomes hard to reverse. And, if that goes on too long, you get type 2 diabetes.
The drugs to manage that except for lower doses of Metformin tend to not work well and have obnoxious side effects, or to stop working; & some wind up causing other health problems.
This is expensive between the drugs and the extra doctor visits and causes poor quality of life and often doesn’t prevent the damage from the high blood sugar. That in turn can cause you to have problems getting health insurance.
So, it pays huge dividends to you to NOT go there.
3. If your insulin levels and blood sugar levels are high, your body adds extra fat, particularly on your waist.
So, if you control your blood sugar levels you are much less likely to gain fat weight; and you can lose it far more easily. Even better, the things to do to prevent high blood sugar levels tend to cause you to be trim and free of excess fat DIRECTLY because you wind up taking in less calories and burning more.
4. Then there are the other consequences of the damage excessively high blood sugar causes your capillaries in all parts of your body and the associated poor circulation.:
(It’s why doctors DO try to protect you if you get type 2 diabetes.)
Blindness from damage to your eyes and optic nerves.
More likely to get sick and get well less easily due to damage to your immune system and its ability to get its protective blood components to your cells.
Kidney damage and then the obnoxious to deadly consequences to you when they stop working well or at all to filter your blood properly.
Foot amputation and/or gangrene of your feet.
Much higher risk of heart disease, heart attacks, and other cardiovascular diseases such as erectile dysfunction.
The conclusion is that you can be well and have dramatically lower medical costs and quality of life and live far longer and be much trimmer lighter, better looking and sexier if you control your blood sugar.
B. How do you control your blood sugar and keep healthy circulation?
The strategic description is to get close to the kind of food and exercise people evolved to thrive on over millions of years and kept until 5,000 years ago & kept mostly until about 100 years ago.
Get moderate exercise that’s abundant; and some more intense efforts; and some fast moving that you need extra effort to do that you do regularly.
Eat food that’s mostly wild caught animals and fish, plants (mostly vegetables and some whole fruit), nuts, and very little whole grain and no or very, very little refined grains or sugar.
Two of our recent posts have more details on how to do this.:
“Interval cardio prevents senility THREE ways” from Monday, 12-29-2008.
& “3 key ways to keep your health” from Monday, 1-5-2009 earlier this week.
In short, you eat right & get regular exercise each week.
In addition to that, there are supplements that you can take that can help.
Chromium polynicotinate, alpha lipoic acid, & cinnamon definitely help; are safe in normal dosages; and have other health benefits.
And, there are some other supplements that have been shown to help but which I’m less familiar with in terms of their safety.
What about soft drinks and packaged snacks and refined grain breads and cereals and high fructose corn syrup and commercial baked goods and desserts?
It couldn’t be plainer. That stuff is about as safe to eat as arsenic as far has having healthy levels of blood sugar. Few people ate much of similar foods 100 years ago and no one did 5,000 years ago and for the millions of years before that. So, our bodies simply don’t handle them well even if we exercise a lot and not at all if we don’t get enough exercise.
C. Just like driving a car, you cannot control what you cannot see. So other than following a lifestyle that tends to prevent high blood sugar, how do you know if you already have high blood sugar or are doing enough to keep it low?
There are two tests that you can get that measure it.
1. One is a fasting blood sugar reading first thing in the morning.
OK readings are about 77 to 89 with readings in the middle or lower half of that range being ideal.
Readings in the 90’s, 90-99, begin to be dangerous and should be lowered a bit.
Readings in the 100 to 115 range mean you should take immediate and strong efforts to do more to bring them down. (Doctors didn’t used to know this. Mercifully, when I turned up with a reading of 113 once my doctor at the time DID know this; and I knew how to fix it. Now my readings tend to be in the higher 80’s.)
Readings in the 116 to 119 range are even worse and will tend to land you in type 2 diabetes and go UP if you don’t take immediate and massive action to bring them down.
120 and much higher will get you diagnosed as having type 2 diabetes.
2. But fasting blood sugar, though it tends to be accurate, is snapshot at a particular time. Your average blood sugar may be higher if you ate right and exercised a lot the day before. Or your average blood sugar may be lower if you were unusually sedentary and stuffed yourself with bad foods the two days before much more than you usually do.
So, it would be VERY valuable and MUCH more accurate if there was a way to measure what your average blood sugar level was over the last 60 to 90 days.
There IS such a test. It’s called the HBA1C test.
The way it works is that your red blood cells live about 60 to 90 days before your body replaces them with new ones. And, they carry glucose to your other cells and how much of this sugar they have on them can be measured.
OK readings for this one are about 5.1 to 5.7 with the middle to lower half being better.
Readings of 5.8 or 5.9 mean you should take immediate and strong efforts to do more to bring them down; and may tend to land you in type 2 diabetes and go UP if you don’t take immediate and massive action to bring them down.
Readings of 6.0 are right on the border of type 2 diabetes.
6.1 to 6.9 are diagnosed by doctors as low level type 2 diabetes and the better ones will allow you to make an effort to bring the level down and keep it from going up with the methods in this post, particularly if it’s in the 6.0 to 6.4 range.
Above that range, doctors tend to prescribe Metformin.
And, readings of 7.0 and up mean you are in trouble and will get your doctors attention and more drug prescriptions.
One of the best pieces of news I’ve seen in years is that a Silicon Valley company, Metrika, began to make a home tester for HBA1C which they sold to doctors to send home with their patients.
The more recent news is even better. Bayer bought Metrika and now calls it their
HBA1C division and the word is that early to mid-summer this year you’ll be able to buy one at your local drugstore with no prescription needed.
So, you can measure where your blood sugar is now with help from your doctor. And, by mid-June to late July this year, you can do it whenever you want.
Labels: diabetes news, escape prediabetes, lower high blood sugar, prevent type 2 diabetes, reverse type diabetes, why measure your blood sugar levels
posted by David at 2:09 PM
2 Comments:
eheaAs you get older, your body needs more CoQ10 to keep your mitochondira healthy. Taking 200 mg a day of CoQ10 if you are over 40 is wise as is 300 mg a day if you are taking statins.
Doing this can help you keep your blood sugar level where it should be because your mitchondria are the energy or power sources in your cells. So if you are healthy, your cells will burn more energy; you may feel the extra energy; & your body will use more glucose.
Other useful supplments include,
Resveratrol-- which may protect you from harm while you are still bringing down high blood sugar, slow your rate of aging, and for sure will help protect your heart.
These are the supplements that may also help lower high blood sugar;& they are blood sugar supplements I don’t know well yet:
gymnema sylvestre, Malabar tamarind, banaba leaf extract, Bitter melon, vanadium, & Fenugreek.
Vanadium and bitter melon may work OK; but too much vanadium or vanadium taken too long may be harmful I once read. And, I'm not sure of the safety of bitter melon.
But the others may be effective for you and I've heard of no safety issues with them.
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