Chromium can lower high blood sugar significantly

False headlines & the truth about vitamins and minerals, Chromium....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 5-1-2012

Most doctors know little about supplements including vitamins and minerals and are too busy to find out more unless they somehow get updated by their patients or other doctors who know more. 

Some doctors have studied supplements and find they can get superior results with patients by using the indicated supplements.  Since the supplements cost less than drugs and have virtually no side effects that harm quality of life, far more of their patients actually take the supplements than take many drugs.

The drug companies don’t like the competition from those supplements that do work but have none of the side effects most of their drugs do and the supplements cost less.

 (Some drugs do important things and do them fast that supplements cannot do.  And, for some things the drugs are the better choice. Then too some supplements may not be that effective.

But the drug companies appear to be deliberately misinforming doctors and the media and thus many of the rest of us about supplements that do work.)

So you may have seen headlines like “Vitamins are a waste of money or dangerous” AND “Vitamin E causes Prostate Cancer.”

But the truth is far different.  Very different!

1.  Most vitamins and minerals are beneficial and some are spectacularly beneficial. 

There a few vitamins and minerals that do have side effects in doses that are too large.  But if you know what level is safe on those few, those same vitamins and minerals can benefit you.

This makes the headline, “Vitamins are a waste of money or dangerous” false & I think deliberately misleading.

2.  We know 4 things about vitamin E and prostate cancer.  The headline as quoted, “Vitamin E causes Prostate Cancer" is completely false.  And the other 3 things help prevent prostate cancer!  (The study did not test real vitamin E but a poor artificial copy that was not real vitamin E!)

We covered vitamin E the first week in this series, on Tuesday, 3-13-2012.

We covered vitamin D3 last week, on Tuesday, 3-20-2012.

We covered vitamin B3, niacin, on Tuesday, 3-27-2012.

We covered the other B complex vitamins last week on Tuesday, 4-3-2012.

We covered vitamin C on Thursday, 4-12

On Tuesday, 4-17 we covered vitamin A & carotenes and related compounds.

Last week, on Tuesday, 4-24 we covered calcium.

This week we cover Chromium.

If you ever ingest refined grains or sugar or artificial sweeteners or high fructose corn syrup and don’t exercise or eat many foods high in fiber, your blood sugar will tend to rise dramatically.

Then your body will play catch up and release a surge of insulin to allow your body to bring your blood sugar back to normal and to use some of the sugar.  Then it drops too low when this process overshoots and you become hungry for something with sugar in it.

This is a VERY bad idea indeed.  You wind up eating more sugary calories than you burn and the excess insulin causes your body to store the excess as fat.

But if you keep doing it, it gets worse.

You get fatter of course; but you also begin to have your body pay less and less attention to the insulin surge.  It’s like living next to a road that always has sirens or has trains in the middle of the night.  Your body always reacts but your notice of it gradually is less and less.

When that happens, your blood sugar doesn’t go back to normal. And I believe some of the insulin is left over too because your body releases more since it works less well.

It’s called insulin resistance.

Two things happen then. 

With more sugar and insulin in your blood, you get even fatter.

But the extra sugar sticks to your LDL cholesterol and treats your capillaries and blood vessel walls to a sand-paper like effect.

If THAT gets too bad, it causes all sorts of problems with your circulation all over your body.

You can wind up with severe heart disease, being blind, having ED, having vascular dementia, and foot amputation if it gets bad enough or continues long enough.

The best cure for this is to:

1.  Never eat or drink artificial sweeteners or high fructose corn syrup.  (That means never drink ANY soft drinks or eat foods containing these things.)

Similarly, virtually eliminate eating refined grains or foods containing them and even then eating them in tiny quantities only and not very often.

It also helps to cut down on sugar to 2 to 5% of calories.  And, 2% is better for you and less fattening.

Similarly, restrict even 100 % whole grain foods to small servings. Or don’t eat them every day.

2.  Eat nonstarchy vegetables, some whole fresh fruit, health OK protein foods, and health OK oils and spices instead.  The Mediterranean and DASH II diets and their combination in other words is what to eat instead most of the time. 

3.  Get moderate and/or vigorous exercise almost every day of every week.

But if you have not been doing these things and have high blood sugar or you do them and your blood sugar is still a bit high, isn’t there something you can do?

Or if you are pretty good at these things but not perfect, isn’t there something else you can do?

Yes.

One of the most effective and safest ways to do this AND get extra heart protection is to take 200 or 400 mcg a day of chromium polynicotinate a day.

In addition to eating right and regular vigorous exercise taking this much of this chromium supplement makes your insulin work better again.  So your body lowers your blood sugar closer to desirable levels but uses less insulin. 

(Solgar makes a chromium polynicotinate supplement that I take.  The small amount of niacin in the supplement helps protect your heart and is one of the reasons my protective HDL cholesterol level is so high.  Since heart disease protection is so important for people with blood sugar problems, I think this form of chromium is far and away the superior one to take.)

In fact in one study, Dr Sears quotes, some diabetics took chromium supplements for 30 days. Their heart risky LDL went down by more than 10 points. Their HBA1C, a measure of their average blood sugar, went down.  The chromium made a significant difference in their fasting blood sugar too.  It went down by 26 points.

This actually happened to me a few years ago! 

I was mostly eating right, exercising regularly, drinking no soft drinks, and taking some heart protective supplements.  But back then I knew little about blood sugar risks.  I’d allowed myself to use a bit too much sugar on my oatmeal and was eating sugar added apple sauce.

Mercifully, my doctor then knew to add fasting glucose to my cholesterol tests.  I got 115 on my fasting glucose.  That should have scared me severely.  But then I didn’t know that.  Thankfully my doctor knew it was bad news and told me.

I’d heard chromium might help.  So I cut the sugar on my oatmeal in half and went back to ONLY eating no sugar added apple sauce AND I began taking 200 mcg a day of chromium polynicotinate a day.

My retest after that was 87; and I’ve never tested over 100 again.  I’ve also cut back more on my sugar since then for fat loss reasons.

Adding the chromium was a significant contributor to that 28 point drop.

So, taking chromium supplements can be very protective indeed!