Does blood sugar matter if you don’t have diabetes?
Most conversation about blood sugar happens in the context of diabetes—a condition characterized by chronically high glucose levels (AKA blood sugar). However, it turns out that glucose dynamics affect everyone’s health.
When blood sugar is erratic, you can experience poor energy and focus in the short term and develop serious health conditions in time, no matter how thin, fit, or seemingly healthy you are.
Your blood sugar levels contribute to common health concerns like weight gain, hormonal issues, and mental health, as well as chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and cardiovascular risk.
Understanding why blood sugar changes and why that matters is core to your daily experience and long-term health. It’s also vital to our health as a society.
Blood sugar problems are pervasive—more than a third of US adults have prediabetes, and 80% don’t know it. Eight of the top 10 leading causes of death are tied to high blood sugar and its consequences.
The good news is that you can change your blood sugar levels. In fact, this critical health lever is largely within your control, changeable with simple tweaks to your daily habits. By adjusting behaviors like diet, exercise, stress levels, and sleep, you can meaningfully move the needle on your blood sugar and take control of your health.
Read on to learn what blood sugar is, the many aspects of health it influences, how to change it, and how to measure your levels.
What is blood sugar?
Blood sugar, or glucose, is one of the primary energy sources powering cells in your body. When you eat foods with carbohydrates, your body converts them into glucose as they break down, causing your blood sugar level to rise.
Eating will nearly always cause a gradual rise in blood sugar, as most foods—even whole vegetables—have some level of carbs. That’s normal and healthy. Your body has processes for getting your glucose back to its baseline.
However, some meals can produce a “spike,” or dramatic increase in blood sugar levels. The types and quantities of foods we eat cause different degrees of spike, and how we react to food varies among people. And today, we are bombarded with many times more sugar and refined carbohydrates (the type most likely to spike blood sugar) than our ancestors ever were; we consumer nearly 10x more sugar per day than we did 200 years ago.
Lifestyle factors like exercise, sleep, and stress also impact blood sugar response. Poor sleep, for instance, can lead to higher blood sugar spikes the next day. Exercise after eating can blunt rises.
Big blood sugar spikes and subsequent crashes represent a fueling system gone awry. When spikes happen repeatedly, they can have serious impacts on health. These consequences are partly due to how glucose spikes impact insulin and can create insulin resistance.
What is insulin resistance?
When glucose levels rise, your body produces a hormone called insulin, which helps process glucose and shuttle it from the blood into the cells. Producing insulin is normal, but when glucose spikes are too big or too frequent, they cause more and more insulin production. This eventually leads to cells becoming less responsive to insulin, a state known as insulin resistance. In response, the body produces more insulin to deal with the glucose, which worsens insulin resistance, eventually leading to chronically high blood sugar. Insulin resistance is at the root of many health problems stemming from poor blood sugar regulation.
How does blood sugar impact health?
Since glucose is fuel for your cells, dysregulated glucose can impair how your cells work throughout your body, driving dysfunction in your veins, brain, organs, muscles, and more. And the effects of that cellular damage cause everything from subtle differences in how we feel to our overall mortality risk.
Blood sugar impacts your daily experience
There are many everyday impacts of blood sugar dysregulation. When blood sugar is high, it can lead to fatigue, brain fog, cravings and bad skin.
If you’ve had a sugar high or sugar crash, experienced an afternoon slump, or felt bad when you’ve gone a long time without eating, these are all related to having blood sugar levels that are too high or too low.
However, when blood sugar is stable, our energy levels are higher, our skin is clearer, we have more mental clarity and better memor, and we are less susceptible to cravings or crashes that throw off our eating habits.
Blood sugar matters for everyday health concerns
Blood sugar is also relevant to many health issues people manage regularly. For example, when your blood sugar (and insulin) levels are consistently high, your body begins to convert excess glucose to fat, which can lead to weight gain. Also, insulin prevents fat burning, so high insulin levels make it harder to lose that extra weight. Blood sugar also matters when dealing with hormonal dysfunction and mental health.
Blood sugar affects your risk of chronic health conditions
Repeated blood sugar spikes cause damage in your cells that, over time, can contribute to developing chronic conditions. Similarly, insulin plays crucial roles in several processes, so when it’s dysregulated because of insulin resistance, it can increase your risk of other diseases. Here are just a few of the long-term health problems related to blood sugar:
Type 2 diabetes is the condition of chronically high glucose levels and is itself the eighth leading cause of death; its complications also contribute to others, such as cardiovascular disease.
Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are so associated with poor metabolic health that the latter is commonly referred to as Type 3 diabetes.
The risk of heart disease is worsened by insulin resistance and high glucose, which can damage blood vessels.
Certain types of cancer are also more common among people with glucose dysregulation, including breast and prostate cancers.
What can I do to maintain healthy blood sugar?
Healthy glucose levels are largely in your control through your lifestyle choices around diet, exercise, sleep and stress. That said, it can still be challenging in our modern environment, saturated with hidden sugars and toxins. The good news: these don’t have to be massive changes like going vegan or training for a marathon. Simple changes go a long way when it comes to metabolic health. Here are four key levers of blood sugar control.
Eat foods that keep blood sugar stable
The most important thing you can do is eat foods that do not cause sharp rises, specifically focusing on nutrient-dense, whole foods, and avoid foods that spike your blood sugar such as processed foods. It’s essential to consider your choice of carbohydrates and stick to carbs that your body can process slowly, such as vegetables with lots of fiber.
Change how you eat your food
While what you eat is essential, research demonstrates that how you eat also matters. For example, whether you eat carbohydrates alone or with proteins or fats, the order in which you eat your food and the time of day you eat all make a difference in how blood sugar rises.
Exercise regularly
Exercise has a profound impact on blood sugar, no matter the intensity. Studies show that simply walking after a meal can blunt a blood sugar rise (it works believe me!!). Meanwhile, an intense exercise like HIIT or weight training helps your body build the ability to process glucose better. The bottom line: choose the activity that works best for you and move every day.
Prioritize healthy sleep and stress levels
Getting less than six hours per night impairs glucose metabolism and increases insulin. Not only is the amount of sleep relevant, but sleep quality makes a big difference.
Stress can also lead to higher glucose levels through the relationship between stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline on glucose and insulin.
Blood sugar is a critical health metric most of us don’t think enough about, even as it can silently wreak havoc on our day and our long-term well-being. However, it is also one of the most controllable factors, easy to influence with simple, day-to-day choices. Just by being more mindful of how and what you eat, and knowing the impact it does to your your blood sugar, you can do a lot to improve your life and health.
Stay sweet my friends,
Love,
Andrea
