Diabetic Diet & Blood Gluecose

Why must our blood glucose levels be controlled?
What hormone is involved in controlling our blood glucose levels?
Where is the hormone made?
Where does this hormone have its affect?
Diabetics can not controlle their blood sugar level properly. How is this treated?

> Why must our blood glucose levels be controlled?
Having blood glucose level too low means things like feelings of weariness. Way too low means coma and death.
Having blood glucose level too high can bring things like nerve damage (including blindness!), decreased healing of wounds, increased susceptibility to injury infections.

> What hormone is involved in controlling our blood glucose levels?
Insulin is the primary one, but also glucagon.

> Where is the hormone made?
The "islet of Langerhans" cells of the Pancreas

> Where does this hormone have its affect?
The cells of the body. It permits them to move glucose from the bloodstream into the cell interiors.

> Diabetics can not controlle their blood sugar level properly. How is this treated?
There are two main forms of diabetes.
Type 1 diabetes is treated with injections of insulin.

Type 2 diabetes is treated with:
Exercise
Diet
Weight loss
Certain prescription drugs (metformin, and a few others)
If those things don’t help enough, then also injections of insulin

whats the minimum and maximum amount of time you are supposed to go without eating before measuring your blood glucose?

it’s usually 8 hours fasting before measuring the blood glucose level & the normal fasting bl. glucose level ranges from 60-90 mg/dl (<100)

What are the effects of simple carbs and complex carbs on blood glucose levels? Any information would help me greatly.
Thanks

Carbohydrates are simply long chains of sugar molecules hooked end-to-end. When a person eats carbohydrates their normal digestive process breaks up these chains into the individual sugar molecules, and they pass right through the intestinal wall into the bloodstream, and load up the bloodstream with sugar. Complex carbs supposedly get absorbed more slowly, but they do go into the blood stream.

If this happened every once in a while it would not be a problem. But as diets today are so high in carbohydrates, people have a constant high level of sugar pouring into their bloodstream year after year!

This requires their body to continuously produce high levels of insulin to keep that sugar level down. (Insulin’s job is to push sugar out of the bloodstream into the cells where it is used for energy.)

Eventually the cells in their body becomes insensitive to the effects of the insulin (insulin resistance). To handle this problem of insulin resistance their body begins to produce even higher levels of insulin. This continues until their pancreas reaches the maximum amount of insulin it can produce, and when the insulin resistance increases again, their blood sugar begins to rise out of control.

The result is type 2 diabetes! Type 2 diabetes is actually an extreme case of insulin resistance.

In what ways do carbohydrates affect blood glucose levels? What role does the type of carbohydrate have? What role does the glycemic index or glycemic loading have, if any? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Carbs increase blood glucose. Different carbs raise your blood glucose levels at different rates. Complex carbs raise them more slowly (they are low on the glycemic index), simple carbs raise them faster (they are high on the glycemic index). Your welcome for doing your homework

In what ways do carbohydrates affect blood glucose levels? What role does the type of carbohydrate have? What role does the glycemic index or glycemic loading have, if any?

High glycemic index carbs spike blood sugar causing insulin reaction and then your body stores all the food you just ate instead of burning it for fuel. Lower glycemic index digests slower. It wont spike blood sugar. This takes a long answer i suggest you search the internet

All vets in the area are closed until monday. My older dog became very lethargic tonight and has been drinking/urinating excessively. After she vomited a few times tonight, I decided to take her blood glucose and found it is alarmingly high. Is there anything I can do to help her before Monday? I’ve read mixed reports on using cinnamon to bring it down… any experience with this? Thanks everyone

Very often, dry grain based foods are to blame for diabetes in dogs and cats.

If her blood sugar is very high, she still needs to see a vet now. She also needs a completely different diet because what she is eating now is NOT working.

Carbohydrates work just like sugar to a dog or cats system. Just like in humans, there’s only so many times you can spike your blood sugar with too much sugar before eventually the system that regulates blood sugar in your body just breaks. Obviously, that’s oversimplifying, but, that’s the basics of what happens. Now that it has happened, there will always be a need to monitor and manage her blood sugar.

What you want is a canned dog food only, NOT dry. It would be best for it to be grain free, though even good canned foods usually have some potato. BUT, the first ingredients should ALL be meat.

Merricks makes some good canned foods, so does Blue Buffalo. They are both available at stores like Petsmart and Petco.

Once you change her food, it will change how much insulin she needs! It is very important to keep testing and working with your vet to modify her dose. Otherwise, you risk her going hypoglycemic which is also very dangerous!

No treats at all for her either, most of those have tons of sugar and carbs in them.

But, I would call the vets, many of them have a 24 hour answering service that will call them for an emergency and high blood glucose is an emergency.

My blood sugars have been so bad for a while now that my doctor recommended the continuous blood glucose monitor. It’s the Minimed version I believe.

So what are the pros and cons of this? I will be trying it out eventually obviously but won’t be getting it for about another month now. What do you think of it?

Thanks!

Pros-It will help keep track of your numbers more often but you still need to check your sugar 4x a day so the sensor is calibrated correctly. It alerts you when your blood sugars are going out of range.

Cons-Its really expensive, especially if insurance won’t cover it and it is still pricey if they do. You can call Minimed and ask them about what you would be paying. You would have a second device hooked up to your abdomen, not sure how you feel about that.

I am in the same situation about getting one but the thing stopping me is the price because I am on tight budget because I am going back to school in a month. At my doctors office they had a CGM and I was able to try it for a week to see if I even liked it.

My brother has type 1 diabetes. What’s the most accurate blood glucose meter available that has a usb connector and s reasonably priced?

All of the presently available glucometers are equally accurate. Your brother should base his choice on the price of the strips not the price of the glucometer as he will be using the strips for the rest of his life. You are correct that some glucometers have USB ports and as a physician I prefer that patients use these. These glucometers will print out 5 pages of data analyzing averaging and charting readings. I ask patients to email their results. The computer is not used by physicians as often as it should be. It improves communication and reduces cost. I wish you both the very best of health and in all things may God bless.

I am 16 years old and overweight. Diabetes runs in my family but I’m not sure if I have it. I checked my blood glucose and it was high, 160. I am always tired and have headaches sometimes. Please only serious answers. Thanks!

It all depends when you took the test. If 1 to 2 hours after you ate , it high. Here are the numbers and when to test:
Normal Fasting Blood Sugar
A normal fasting blood sugar (which is also the blood sugar a normal person will see right before a meal) is:

83 mg/dl (4.6 mmol/L) or less.

Many normal people have fasting blood sugars in the mid and high 70 mg/dl (3.9 mmol/L) range.

Though most doctors will tell you any fasting blood sugar under 100 mg/dl (5.6 mmol/L) is "normal", there are several studies that suggest that testing with a fasting blood sugar in the mid 90 mg/dl (5 mmol/L) range often predicts diabetes that is diagnosed a decade later.
Post-Meal Blood Sugar (Postprandial)
Independent of what they eat, the blood sugar of a truly normal person is:

Under 120 mg/dl (6.6 mmol/L) one or two hours after a meal.

Also if you are heavy , lose weight.
Eat a low glycemic Index Diet.http://www.mendosa.com/gilists.htm

This table includes the glycemic index and glycemic load of more than 2,480 individual food items. Not all of them, however, are available in the United States. They represent a true international effort of testing around the world.

The glycemic index (GI) is a numerical system of measuring how much of a rise in circulating blood sugar a carbohydrate triggers–the higher the number, the greater the blood sugar response. So a low GI food will cause a small rise, while a high GI food will trigger a dramatic spike. A list of carbohydrates with their glycemic values is shown below. A GI is 70 or more is high, a GI of 56 to 69 inclusive is medium, and a GI of 55 or less is low.

The glycemic load (GL) is a relatively new way to assess the impact of carbohydrate consumption that takes the glycemic index into account, but gives a fuller picture than does glycemic index alone. A GI value tells you only how rapidly a particular carbohydrate turns into sugar. It doesn’t tell you how much of that carbohydrate is in a serving of a particular food. You need to know both things to understand a food’s effect on blood sugar. That is where glycemic load comes in. The carbohydrate in watermelon, for example, has a high GI. But there isn’t a lot of it, so watermelon’s glycemic load is relatively low. A GL of 20 or more is high, a GL of 11 to 19 inclusive is medium, and a GL of 10 or less is low.

Foods that have a low GL almost always have a low GI. Foods with an intermediate or high GL range from very low to very high GI.

Both GI and GL are listed here. The GI is of foods based on the glucose index–where glucose is set to equal 100. The other is the glycemic load, which is the glycemic index divided by 100 multiplied by its available carbohydrate content (i.e. carbohydrates minus fiber) in grams. (The "Serve size (g)" column is the serving size in grams for calculating the glycemic load; for simplicity of presentation I have left out an intermediate column that shows the available carbohydrates in the stated serving sizes.) Take, watermelon as an example of calculating glycemic load. Its glycemic index is pretty high, about 72. According to the calculations by the people at the University of Sydney’s Human Nutrition Unit, in a serving of 120 grams it has 6 grams of available carbohydrate per serving, so its glycemic load is pretty low, 72/100*6=4.32, rounded to 4.

And last but not least . Get off the couch. Exercise at least 1 hour a day.

Good luck Tin

Cinnamon is supposed to help regulate blood glucose levels. Does anyone have success with it?

I take cinnamon but I truly don’t know if it really helps because I do so much more to control my glucose levels. My fasting is 96 and my hba1c is 5.5. It’s too hard to determine what is working and what is not.
I take 2000 mg of metformin a day and 3 mg. of Amaryl.
Plus I exercise 1 1/2 hours a day . Nordic Walking Google it.
And also I follow a low glycemic index diet ;http://www.mendosa.com/gilists.htm

So who knows. But I will tell you that it sure can’t hurt to try.
Also try the lemon or lime juice and also use vinegar on your salads.
Use ¼ to ½ teaspoon of cinnamon per day. Add it to your coffee, oatmeal, smoothie, or wherever you find it palatable.
If you already suffer from diabetes, be sure to stay on a regular schedule with your cinnamon usage so that your blood sugar levels don’t yo-yo.Use the same amount at the same time every day so that you can get a sense of how cinnamon affects your own personal blood sugar readings.
Use the powdered spice or a cinnamon stick. Cinnamon pills are also available, and can be found easily via an online search. MHCP is water soluble and is not found in cinnamon oil.

Lime and lemon juice delay the digestion of starches as does vinegar. I’ve found that 2-3 tablespoons of lime or lemon juice reduces my post prandial BG response by 10-20 points. Rick Mendosa’s site has a lot of material on acids in the diet. Take a look at http://www.mendosa.com/acidic_foods.htm .

Good luck
Tin