Sugar Kills

Blood sugar is a fascinating topic.  It’s coming more and more into our public awareness all the time, especially as we become more aware of sugar and some of the bad side effects of that high fructose corn syrup can have.  We’ve all been aware of blood sugar for a long time.  It’s something you’re supposed to be aware of.  Doctors check for it.  Some of us even have trouble with low blood sugar even though most public awareness centers around high blood sugar.

There are a lot of people who have low blood sugar too.  In fact most people who drink a couple of cups of coffee in the morning get a message that triggers their brains to think that they have low blood sugar, so they mobilize blood.  I guess that’s why it’s such a popular thing to have the “mocha-chocha-chocolata-whatever” with your coffee these days for an extra $5.  When you drink that massive amount of caffeine it tells the brain that you don’t have enough blood sugar, even though your levels might be quite adequate.  So your liver starts mobilizing sugar to put it into the blood stream. 

Most of the focus these day is around high blood sugar.  That’s what’s normally called diabetes.  Most of the focus is particularly on Type 2, because that is the one we can do the most about.  We can’t do a lot to cure Type 2, but we can certainly mitigate it’s effects with standard medicine.  Too much blood sugar for too long has some really horrific symptoms.  You can loose toes, get kidney damage, lose kidneys, heart disease, heart attacks.  All disease across the board goes up when your blood sugar goes up.  Your life expectancy goes down.  Even cancer risk goes up.  Research papers are coming out about that any given week.  All of those things are harmful effects of increased blood sugar.  

Where is this coming from?  Well we’ve got, as I mentioned previously, high fructose corn syrup in everything these days.  There’s plenty of information online that you can find about high fructose corn syrup, what’s in it, and some of its damaging properties.  Plain old refined sugar isn’t a healthy thing to eat either.  

Interestingly, the brain has to have sugar to run on.  In fact, that’s all the brain can burn.  It doesn’t have any protein or fat stores.  That’s why it is so important that your blood is kept in a fairly range of blood sugar.  Your brain doesn’t work without it.  

There is another interesting caveat and that is cancer cells also can only burn sugar.  They can’t mobilize protein or fat either for their energy resources.  Muscle cells, liver cells, other cells in the body can all break down protein and fat to locally generate sugar inside of the cell for its use as an energy source.  But brain cells, and interestingly enough, cancer cells can’t do that.  They have to get their supply of sugar directly from the bloodstream.  That’s their basic energy.  That’s the gasoline.  That’s what we run on.

How do you keep it at a good level? We’ve tried to substitute insulin and drugs for good old exercise and diet.  Those are the cornerstones of maintaining a good blood glucose level.  Even diabetics can lower their blood sugar without using any extra insulin or drugs just by exercising.  It’s the magic key that opens the door to get sugar out of the blood and into the cells without anything else.  Just good old wholesome exercise and eating right…  by eating right I mean protein, healthy fats, lots of vegetables and fruit and staying away from the sugars as much as we can.