Why to check your blood sugar and prevent diabetes....
Today's Post: Thursday, 11-4-2010
Type 2 diabetes can really hurt you if it gets bad before you find out you have the problem or if you find out only after it becomes really hard to reverse.
As I saw in a health article, this month, November is diabetes awareness month.
And, according to a health news article this morning -- about one adult out of 6 in the United States has type 2 diabetes.
Since many more people have blood sugar readings that are headed that way and the same poor diet and lack of exercise that cause closer to half of all Americans to be too fat today also tend to cause type 2 diabetes, today, right now, is a good time to get up to speed on what to do and why.
The other thing is that if you are just headed that way or still have a low level case of type 2 diabetes, the damage may not be too bad or even be reversible. And, you may be able to reverse course and turn off type 2 diabetes entirely.
Type 2 diabetes causes damage in your capillaries almost everywhere they go. So, if you get a bad enough case that you find you have it by getting symptoms, you can wind up with a heart attack you could have avoided or severe kidney damage or vascular dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, or go blind, or have to have a foot amputated due to poor circulation to it. Yikes!
Worse, except for the drug metformin which has modest side effects at low doses and you only need to supplement with extra vitamin B12 in most cases to be safe taking it, the other drugs to keep your blood sugar down can actually harm you themselves.
So, type 2 diabetes with symptoms or HBA1C levels above 7.0 or 8.0 is a place you likely NEVER want to go!
Here’s the most important part of this post:
If you haven’t had your blood sugar measured, you could be headed that way or have even arrived there and not know it!
Living today without knowing your blood sugar levels is
like driving on a busy freeway without looking out the windshield. You’re likely to be in a bad wreck!
So get tested right away and every year or so or more often if the first test is high.
If you have never had the tests
or you are over 40,
or have people in your family who have type 2 diabetes such as your father or uncle or mother or grandmother,
or your ancestors are from Haiti, some South Sea islands, some American Indian tribes, or from India or Pakistan,
you should make an effort to get tested within a couple of weeks!
This is also true if you drink tap water. Some of it is slightly high in Arsenic. Unfortunately that makes it easier to get and more likely that you’ll get type 2 diabetes.
The two tests are fasting blood sugar and HBA1C. You learn more and know more if you get both tests.
1. Fasting blood sugar is a one point in time snapshot. If it’s too high, that’s bad and if it’s OK, that’s good. But it might be misleading. At that time, it may be elevated way more than usual and you might be more OK than the reading suggests – OR – it may be much lower than is usual for you, and you might have a problem that it could miss.
Desirable is 89 or less. OK but not great or too bad is 90 to 99.
High enough to be important to bring down but not yet type 2 diabetes is 100 to 119.
And if it’s 120 or over and for sure if it’s 135 or over, you may have and be diagnosed as having type 2 diabetes.
(Personal note: Before I learned this stuff, my doctor included fasting glucose or blood sugar when I got my cholesterols checked. Despite not eating that badly and doing regular exercise, he saw that my reading was 115. He let me know right away that this was a dangerous reading that should be brought down.
I had no clue until then. But I had fallen into the habit of buying applesauce with sugar added instead of the No Sugar added kind. And, I was adding too much sugar on my oatmeal. I’d also considered taking a chromium supplement and the antioxidant alpha lipoic acid but had not added them to what I take each day. They have other health benefits but they also help you process sugar and have lower blood sugar levels
So, I cut the sugar I put on my oatmeal in half. I went to ONLY buying No Sugar added apple sauce. And I began taking 200 mcg of chromium polynicotinate and 200 mg of alpha lipoic acid every day. These changes became my new normal way of doing things and I’ve kept doing them. In fact, I’ve cut my sugar on my oatmeal in half again by only adding it half as often.
My fasting blood sugar promptly dropped below 99 and has remained there ever since. My most recent readings have been in the 82 to 87 range.
It likely would have dropped less if I’d been eating even more sugar before that or hadn’t been getting regular vigorous exercise. But then had I not been doing those things, I might have already had type 2 diabetes!)
2. HBA1C is so valuable to know because it is the average of your blood sugar level for the last 60 to 90 days so it’s extremely accurate.
If it’s low, you are in the clear and safe on blood sugar. And, if it’s high, you are in TROUBLE!
The H stands for hemoglobin and the test measures the sugars on your red blood cells. Since they last about 60 to 90 days, that’s why the test measures your average blood sugar for that long.
An HBA1C reading of 5.6 or a bit less is desirable. 5.7 to 5.9 likely should be brought down a bit.
And, 6.0 to 6.9 is a health action emergency. You need to slash the sugars and white rices and breads and refined grain foods and potatoes and commercially made or packaged desserts and snacks out of your diet. You need to drink no soft drinks at all – either regular OR diet. And, if you haven’t already begun to do so, you need to do regular and vigorous exercise 5 or more days each week. The good news is that one study found that even 60 seconds of really vigorous exercise a day will bring down your HBA1C.
Unfortunately, some doctors consider those readings as diagnosing type 2 diabetes and want you to take a whole list of drugs. This is likely NOT a good idea for readings that low if you are willing to do the things listed here.
That’s why you should take action at readings from 5.7 to 5.9 or sooner. – or when your fasting glucose first reads 100 or more.
The good news in this is that if you do these things, you will likely be a good bit less fat and your heart health readings and real protection from heart disease will get much better.
But if you are a bit fat or don’t exercise or are over 40, it’s really important to get these two tests BEFORE you have problems.
7.0 or higher IS type 2 diabetes, period.
If you get that high a reading, the drug metformin at a lower dose will likely be worth taking. If your HBA1C is over 7.5 you might want to take the metformin every 12 hours or twice a day instead of once. And, if that causes you no side effects, you might want to try a higher dose twice a day. Some people get side effects at that point that make it hard to take that much; but you may not.
So far, this is the only drug I know of to bring down blood sugar that’s safe to take.
So, unless you want to graduate to drugs with harmful AND obnoxious side effects you also need to to slash the sugars and white rices and breads and refined grain foods and potatoes and commercially made or packaged desserts and snacks out of your diet. You need to drink no soft drinks at all – either regular OR diet. And, if you haven’t already begun to do so, you need to do regular and vigorous exercise 5 or more days each week. The good news is that one study found that even 60 seconds of really vigorous exercise a day will bring down your HBA1C.
You should also do those things regardless because you will badly need the other kinds of health protection doing them will give you that the drugs will not!
Lastly, if you get a reading that high, you need to make a very strong effort to lose any excess fat you have and keep it off. Doing that will about double the effects of these lifestyle upgrades. The good news is that the lifestyle upgrades will make fat loss much easier, doable, and easy to keep off permanently.
My hope for you is that you test in the OK zone now or are successful in getting there before you are harmed if you test too high at first.
Today's Post: Thursday, 11-4-2010
Type 2 diabetes can really hurt you if it gets bad before you find out you have the problem or if you find out only after it becomes really hard to reverse.
As I saw in a health article, this month, November is diabetes awareness month.
And, according to a health news article this morning -- about one adult out of 6 in the United States has type 2 diabetes.
Since many more people have blood sugar readings that are headed that way and the same poor diet and lack of exercise that cause closer to half of all Americans to be too fat today also tend to cause type 2 diabetes, today, right now, is a good time to get up to speed on what to do and why.
The other thing is that if you are just headed that way or still have a low level case of type 2 diabetes, the damage may not be too bad or even be reversible. And, you may be able to reverse course and turn off type 2 diabetes entirely.
Type 2 diabetes causes damage in your capillaries almost everywhere they go. So, if you get a bad enough case that you find you have it by getting symptoms, you can wind up with a heart attack you could have avoided or severe kidney damage or vascular dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, or go blind, or have to have a foot amputated due to poor circulation to it. Yikes!
Worse, except for the drug metformin which has modest side effects at low doses and you only need to supplement with extra vitamin B12 in most cases to be safe taking it, the other drugs to keep your blood sugar down can actually harm you themselves.
So, type 2 diabetes with symptoms or HBA1C levels above 7.0 or 8.0 is a place you likely NEVER want to go!
Here’s the most important part of this post:
If you haven’t had your blood sugar measured, you could be headed that way or have even arrived there and not know it!
Living today without knowing your blood sugar levels is
like driving on a busy freeway without looking out the windshield. You’re likely to be in a bad wreck!
So get tested right away and every year or so or more often if the first test is high.
If you have never had the tests
or you are over 40,
or have people in your family who have type 2 diabetes such as your father or uncle or mother or grandmother,
or your ancestors are from Haiti, some South Sea islands, some American Indian tribes, or from India or Pakistan,
you should make an effort to get tested within a couple of weeks!
This is also true if you drink tap water. Some of it is slightly high in Arsenic. Unfortunately that makes it easier to get and more likely that you’ll get type 2 diabetes.
The two tests are fasting blood sugar and HBA1C. You learn more and know more if you get both tests.
1. Fasting blood sugar is a one point in time snapshot. If it’s too high, that’s bad and if it’s OK, that’s good. But it might be misleading. At that time, it may be elevated way more than usual and you might be more OK than the reading suggests – OR – it may be much lower than is usual for you, and you might have a problem that it could miss.
Desirable is 89 or less. OK but not great or too bad is 90 to 99.
High enough to be important to bring down but not yet type 2 diabetes is 100 to 119.
And if it’s 120 or over and for sure if it’s 135 or over, you may have and be diagnosed as having type 2 diabetes.
(Personal note: Before I learned this stuff, my doctor included fasting glucose or blood sugar when I got my cholesterols checked. Despite not eating that badly and doing regular exercise, he saw that my reading was 115. He let me know right away that this was a dangerous reading that should be brought down.
I had no clue until then. But I had fallen into the habit of buying applesauce with sugar added instead of the No Sugar added kind. And, I was adding too much sugar on my oatmeal. I’d also considered taking a chromium supplement and the antioxidant alpha lipoic acid but had not added them to what I take each day. They have other health benefits but they also help you process sugar and have lower blood sugar levels
So, I cut the sugar I put on my oatmeal in half. I went to ONLY buying No Sugar added apple sauce. And I began taking 200 mcg of chromium polynicotinate and 200 mg of alpha lipoic acid every day. These changes became my new normal way of doing things and I’ve kept doing them. In fact, I’ve cut my sugar on my oatmeal in half again by only adding it half as often.
My fasting blood sugar promptly dropped below 99 and has remained there ever since. My most recent readings have been in the 82 to 87 range.
It likely would have dropped less if I’d been eating even more sugar before that or hadn’t been getting regular vigorous exercise. But then had I not been doing those things, I might have already had type 2 diabetes!)
2. HBA1C is so valuable to know because it is the average of your blood sugar level for the last 60 to 90 days so it’s extremely accurate.
If it’s low, you are in the clear and safe on blood sugar. And, if it’s high, you are in TROUBLE!
The H stands for hemoglobin and the test measures the sugars on your red blood cells. Since they last about 60 to 90 days, that’s why the test measures your average blood sugar for that long.
An HBA1C reading of 5.6 or a bit less is desirable. 5.7 to 5.9 likely should be brought down a bit.
And, 6.0 to 6.9 is a health action emergency. You need to slash the sugars and white rices and breads and refined grain foods and potatoes and commercially made or packaged desserts and snacks out of your diet. You need to drink no soft drinks at all – either regular OR diet. And, if you haven’t already begun to do so, you need to do regular and vigorous exercise 5 or more days each week. The good news is that one study found that even 60 seconds of really vigorous exercise a day will bring down your HBA1C.
Unfortunately, some doctors consider those readings as diagnosing type 2 diabetes and want you to take a whole list of drugs. This is likely NOT a good idea for readings that low if you are willing to do the things listed here.
That’s why you should take action at readings from 5.7 to 5.9 or sooner. – or when your fasting glucose first reads 100 or more.
The good news in this is that if you do these things, you will likely be a good bit less fat and your heart health readings and real protection from heart disease will get much better.
But if you are a bit fat or don’t exercise or are over 40, it’s really important to get these two tests BEFORE you have problems.
7.0 or higher IS type 2 diabetes, period.
If you get that high a reading, the drug metformin at a lower dose will likely be worth taking. If your HBA1C is over 7.5 you might want to take the metformin every 12 hours or twice a day instead of once. And, if that causes you no side effects, you might want to try a higher dose twice a day. Some people get side effects at that point that make it hard to take that much; but you may not.
So far, this is the only drug I know of to bring down blood sugar that’s safe to take.
So, unless you want to graduate to drugs with harmful AND obnoxious side effects you also need to to slash the sugars and white rices and breads and refined grain foods and potatoes and commercially made or packaged desserts and snacks out of your diet. You need to drink no soft drinks at all – either regular OR diet. And, if you haven’t already begun to do so, you need to do regular and vigorous exercise 5 or more days each week. The good news is that one study found that even 60 seconds of really vigorous exercise a day will bring down your HBA1C.
You should also do those things regardless because you will badly need the other kinds of health protection doing them will give you that the drugs will not!
Lastly, if you get a reading that high, you need to make a very strong effort to lose any excess fat you have and keep it off. Doing that will about double the effects of these lifestyle upgrades. The good news is that the lifestyle upgrades will make fat loss much easier, doable, and easy to keep off permanently.
My hope for you is that you test in the OK zone now or are successful in getting there before you are harmed if you test too high at first.
Labels: fasting glucose test, HBA1C test, how to prevent or reverse type 2 diabetes, Why to check your blood sugar and prevent diabetes
posted by David at 2:13 PM
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