Blood Sugar Basics

BLOOD SUGAR BASICS

Why should I care about my blood sugar? It’s a question I hear all the time. But even if you’re an enviable skinny type, your blood sugar levels could be out of whack, triggering diabetes, heart disease, body fat and even cancer. How so?

Foods that are high in sugars, be they simple sugars or most complex carbs, create a surge in blood glucose. The simpler the carb, the more severe the surge. In response, the pancreas pours out insulin, which ushers the glucose into the cells—particularly the cells of muscles and organs, which use the sugars for energy. The brain and heart, for example, need a lot of it.

Consider what happens in a torrential downpour. Rapid release of hordes of rain brings on floods. But if the rain falls slowly and steadily over a period of time, the earth absorbs it.  Our bodies respond likewise.

DIABETES    Type 2 diabetes, the kind associated with poor eating and lack of exercise, occurs when the body, after too much flash flooding of blood sugar, becomes resistant to insulin.  The pancreas has to produce even more insulin to get the glucose into cells. Over time, this insulin resistance becomes so severe that the pancreas can no longer keep up with demand.  If untreated, glucose builds up in the blood, damaging organs and other tissues.

HEART DISEASE   Diabetics are at an increased risk for heart disease, and research is now showing that high blood sugar can have an equally significant effect on non-diabetics. Some recent research from Johns Hopkins, for example, showed that long-term high blood sugar can nearly double your risk of heart disease, even if you haven’t been diagnosed with diabetes.

FAT   Fat cells convert excess glucose to triglycerides and store those fats for later use. This is especially a problem if your blood sugar levels have been high for a long period of time. And there’s another element at play here—your appetite.  Let’s say you’ve just eaten a big plate of pasta—or another high carb meal. The pancreas responds by pumping out enough insulin to disperse the blood sugar; within an hour or so, the process is complete. The result? Once again, you feel hungry. Foods that raise blood glucose levels more slowly, however, encourage the pancreas to release insulin in a more sustained manner and keep your hunger under control. Know what I mean? Try eating some protein instead and see how long it takes for your appetite to come calling.

CANCER   Cancer cells feed on glucose, a theory proposed back in the 1920s by a Nobel award winning scientist and becoming more and more accepted today. PET scans, for example, rely on cancer’s addiction to sugar to show which cells are malignant.  But it’s not necessarily the sugar itself acting as fuel that is the main growth factor for cancer; it’s the production of insulin in response that seems to be the problem. Insulin, like many other factors (copper, iodine, iron, for example) fuels tumor growth.  One group of studies has shown that Metformin, a drug used to control blood sugar in Type 2 diabetics, is associated with a reduced incidence of tumors and better outcomes, and the relationship between diabetes and cancer is now a hot topic in the world of cancer research.

So what can you do to control your blood sugar? Flip the page.