Understanding Your Blood Sugar

Nope! This doesn't require needles or tests or actual blood.

Yup! It’s important even if you don’t have diabetes.

But, it’s especially important, if you do have diabetes. We are hard-wired to love sugar. It’s delicious! But does sugar benefit us beyond its taste? Are there any consequences to loving sugar? To understand how eating sugar affects us, we have to understand how our body turns food into fuel.

Metabolism is turning food into fuel.

Simply put, metabolism is turning food into fuel. As soon as you pop a bit of food into your mouth, metabolism begins. Once you swallow, metabolism continues in the stomach and the gut. However, the exact process of metabolism varies depending on what each bite contains.

When the bite contains carbohydrates, affectionately known as carbs, your blood sugar goes up. A carb is a nutrient defined by its chemical makeup: a combination of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. For our purposes, a carb is a vegetable, fruit or grain.

But carbs are not created equally. Blood sugar goes up minimally when you eat a veggie. It goes up a bit more when you eat a fruit. It goes up significantly when you eat a grain.

And here’s why: in part, it’s because carbs separate into sugar and fiber. Let’s put sugar aside for a moment to talk about fiber. Fiber is inert. You can’t digest it. But fiber does absorb water. That’s how it helps keep your bowels moving. Fiber also binds sugar. So, when you eat a carb with a hefty load of fiber, less sugar is floating in your gut and later in your blood. I’ll get to why that’s good in a bit.

Sugar metabolism is probably the most important part of your overall metabolism. [To be complete, there is more than one “sugar.” So, this post focuses on glucose, the most plentiful sugar. I’ll use “glucose” and “sugar” interchangeably from here on.] While glucose is your body’s primary source of fuel, it’s not the only source. Fat is also a source of energy. Protein is too, but your body is pretty inefficient at turning protein into energy.

When you eat sugar, your pancreas releases a hormone called insulin. Sugar is then pushed out of the gut and into the bloodstream. Insulin’s job is to get sugar out of your bloodstream and inside your cells, your body’s building blocks. This is your body’s most direct route to making energy.

When blood sugar is up, insulin is up.

Insulin controls an organized system of sugar transportation and storage. First, insulin shuttles sugar into your brain and muscle cells. Once those cells are full, next, insulin stores some remaining sugar in the liver. The liver’s sugar storage is called glycogen. Finally, when glycogen is full, insulin sends sugar to the liver to make fat.

When insulin is up, fat is up.

Did you catch that? When there is an overabundance of sugar in your diet, your body makes fat. Put another way, when insulin levels are high, your body will make fat. Insulin will also prevent you from using fat as energy. Yes, when sugar is up, fat burning is down. That’s because the high level of insulin is signalling your body that there is plenty of sugar to burn. Since sugar is your primary fuel source, your body thinks burning fat is inappropriate.

This overabundance of sugar happens more with simple sugars than complex sugars. That’s right … all sugars aren’t created equally either. Try to think of a simple sugar as similar to table sugar. White or brown sugar, syrup, and honey are examples of simple sugars. Other terms you may have heard that describe simple sugars are high glycemic index, glycemic load, glycemic impact or sugar impact. These foods will give you a sugar high. Also, they are more quickly digested and and will increase your blood sugar levels more quickly and more significantly. This is called a blood sugar spike.

Blood sugar spikes start a troubling cycle. As described above, with a blood sugar spike, your pancreas releases insulin. When the spike is from a high sugar impact food, your body packs away the sugar quickly and your blood sugar level decreases just as quickly. This is called a blood sugar crash. But here’s the trick: insulin levels are still high … Insulin is now seeking sugar. You’re now having a sugar craving. So, this is the key equation:

Low blood sugar + high insulin level = SUGAR CRAVING!

When you crave sugar, you eat … you guessed it! Sugar! Your body is practically commanding you to. Your hormones are commanding you to. And this commandment, or craving, is very difficult to discern from actual hunger. And believe it or not, this craving can hit within an hour of filling your stomach with a high sugar impact food. Now, to satisfy your sugar craving, you have to eat twice in an hour. High sugar impact foods cause you to eat more frequently!

High blood sugar leads to body fat.

High blood sugar leads to eating more.

If you grab a high-carb, low-fiber pick-me-up like a Coke to satisfy your craving, you’ll push your blood sugar right back up!

Then, along comes insulin to push the sugar inside your cells. And, without fiber, your blood sugar will be low again before you know it. But insulin is still looking for sugar to store; so, you will go looking for sugar! And on and on it goes … a smart but very tricky blood sugar cycle.

To be sure, this blood sugar spike-crash phenomenon doesn’t happen with low sugar impact foods. In foods like sweet potato and broccoli, not only is there less available sugar … there is fiber! Fiber binds some of the available sugar which smooths out the spikes and eliminates the crash.

Not only does the sugar roller coaster feel terrible, it also decreases insulin’s power. When blood sugar is up consistently, it’s called hyperglycemia. But remember - when blood sugar is up, so is insulin. With hyperglycemia, insulin is around so much, it’s not as intimidating to your body’s cells as it should be. So, your cells start to ignore it. This is called insulin resistance.

Insulin resistance is the most dreaded outcome of overeating sugar.

Insulin resistance is the most dreaded outcome of overeating sugar. When you are insulin-resistant, you can eat and eat sugar, and insulin can’t respond. This is diabetes, Type 2 diabetes, to be specific. The most severe Type 2 diabetes requires a prescription of scheduled insulin injections to try to overcome the body’s limited reaction to insulin.

Diabetes is an awful disease.

In caring for my patients, I see the destruction of diabetes every day. It is an awful disease. As described above, diabetes leads to increased body fat. It also leads to high blood pressure and high cholesterol. People with diabetes are more likely to have dementia. Diabetes causes liver and kidney disease, artery and heart disease. It’s even associated with an increased incidence of cancer and death. Sadly, at least 400 million people worldwide have diabetes.

The average American consumes approximately 152 pounds of sugar a year!

While these illnesses are often, in part, inherited or genetic, our eating habits absolutely play a role. More specifically, it’s our sugar habit. It’s arguable that we, as a nation, are overdosing on sugar, and it’s hurting us. Here are some impressive numbers:

1. At least 20% of the average American’s daily calories come from sugary beverages like Coke.
2. The average American consumes approximately 152 pounds of sugar a year.
3. Food manufacturers add sugar to over 70% of packaged foods.

Sugar is a quick energy fix, but it’s not a long-lasting fix. If you called a plumber to fix your leaky faucet, for how long would you expect the job to last? What if the plumber had to come back several times in one day? No good, right?! Well, sugar is like a bad plumber! Not fit to be hired!

Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that there’s no health benefit to adding sugar to your food.  In fact, the American Heart Association recommends that men eat no more than 9 teaspoons of sugar a day. No more than 6 for women and 3 to 5 for children, depending on their weight.

On average, each of us eats about 25 teaspoons of sugar daily. That’s about 3 to 8 times as much as the recommendation! It would be hard for someone with even the biggest sweet tooth, to add that much sugar to a day’s worth of food. Trust me - you’re not adding all that sugar to your food. It was added well before it got to you - by the manufacturer.

If you don’t have diabetes, your eating doesn’t have to be “sugar-free.” But with a little preparation, you can be fully aware of what you’re eating and keep an eye on your sugar intake.

Nutrition labels can be tricky!

So, to help you take control of your blood sugar, I’d like to leave you with one action step. Learn to read the nutrition labels of the packaged food you buy. Those labels may list “sugar” as an ingredient. But more likely, you’ll read some words that you don’t recognize. It may surprise you to know that many of those words are naming sugars. Nutrition labels can be tricky!

To help a bit more, the following is a list of sugars often found in packaged foods. They’re just called by another name! Be on the lookout for these:

• Agave
• Cane juice
• Dextrose
• Fructose
• Glucose
• Honey
• Maltose
• Maple syrup
• Saccharose
• Sucrose

And there are at least 50 more sneaky names for sugar! Sugar is hiding in plain sight in your food. Because I want you to be your healthiest self, I want you to find it!

Click here for a more in-depth understanding at what the nutrition facts on packaged foods are really telling you about your food’s sugar content. I’ll also share with you 10 “healthy” foods that are hiding big servings of sugar.