Diabetics know all about blood sugar, but it matters to non-diabetics too. So, when you make food choices, keep blood sugar in mind. Dr. Fuhrman explains:
The combination of fat and refined carbohydrates has an extremely powerful effect on driving the signals that promote fat accumulation on the body. Refined foods cause a swift and excessive rise in blood sugar, which in turn triggers insulin surges to drive the sugar out of the blood and into our cells. Unfortunately, insulin also promotes the storage of fat on the body and encourages your fat cells to swell.
As more fat is packed away on the body, it interferes with insulin uptake into our muscle tissues. Our pancreas then senses that the glucose level in the bloodstream is still too high and pumps out even more insulin. A little extra fat around our midsection results in so much interference with insulin’s effectiveness that two to five times as much insulin may be secreted in an overweight person than in a thin person.
And a new study insists that blood sugar levels are indeed important to diabetes-free people too.
Reuters reports:
Only a few prospective studies have looked at associations between blood sugar levels among subjects initially free of diabetes and subsequent risk of death, Dr. Naomi Brewer, of Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand, and colleagues point out in the journal Diabetes Care.
Hemoglobin A1C testing -- a standard way to measure blood sugar -- was offered to people without diabetes during a screening program for hepatitis B in a region of New Zealand from 1999 to 2001. Mortality risk was examined to the end of 2004 in these subjects.
Among a total of 47,904 individuals, whose average age was 38 years, 815 died during the median follow-up of 4.4 years.
Brewer's team found that the risk of premature death rose in tandem with blood sugar levels. The risk of death increased steadily from the A1C "reference category" (4.0% to less than 5.0%) to the highest A1C category (7.0% or higher).
Sadly, I think too many people only worry about blood sugar after they’re staring at a diabetes diagnosis.
