blood glucose levels

For more information about: blood glucose levels visit the Diabetes site DiabetesFAQ.org today.

Q: What are some effective ways of lowering my Blood Glucose Levels?
I am an insulin dependent diabetic and lately my blood glucose levels have been a little high. I have seen both my doctor and diabetic educator regarding this and both have said to give myself more insulin, other than that neither were very helpful. I don’t really want to go over the top with giving myself more insulin and am worried that I may give myself too much. I have eating and exercising well and am wondering what else I can do to lower my blood glucose levels. Any suggestions???

A: Exercise is always a big help for me. I noticed that my blood sugar is always much better for 12 to 24 hours after I exercise. I think it has something to do with the exercise helping your cells use insulin for efficiently/effectively. Although it’s tough to start up a regular routine, it really does help a lot.

Q: Why must our blood glucose levels be controlled?
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?

A: > 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

Q: how does body respond to low blood glucose levels after exercising?
So I know that strenuous exercise causes blood glucose levels to decrease. However, how does the body respond to this stress that there is not enough glucose in the blood?

A: I get shakey. like I’m really nervous, and I’m still breathing fast like I’ve been running. May or may not feel like I’m loosing my balance.

Q: In what ways do carbohydrates affect blood glucose levels? What role does the type of carbohydrate have? What?
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.

A: 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

Q: How would an increase of insulin in the body change blood glucose levels?
Not in terms of diabetes, but like just when the hormone is secreted into your system what exactly happens to your blood glucose levels? And when you increase it?

A: This is an example of homeostasis, a regulation of blood glucose concentration.

The glucose level in the blood may rise after a meal. It may fall during vigorous physical exercise or starvation. How can the body keep the blood glucose level constant?

Some time after a meal rich in sugar or starch, glucose is absorbed into the bloodstream in the small intestine. This brings about:

- an increase in the blood glucose concentration. This is the stimulus.
- the pancreas (receptor) is stimulated

The pancreas secretes more insluin into the bloodstream. Insulin is transported to the liver where it causes the liver to convert the excess glucose to glycogen (corrective mechanism). Glycogen is stored in the liver.

The glucose in the blood decreases to the normal level (negative feedback) before it leaves the liver and enters the general blood circtulation.

hope these are of some help to you:)) enjoy learning more about biology:)))

Q: When are Blood glucose levels harmful to unborn babies?
I am pregnant about 7 weeks they say, and I just started insulin and I was wondering when Blood glucose levels are harmful to my baby. I haven’t had them over 200 lately i have been trying really hard to control them but i am really stressed about my baby.

A: I am a type one insulin dependant diabetic and have been for the last 25 years. I am currently 21 weeks pregnant and take 4 insulin injections per day. My sugar levels have been perfect and are always around 104. A non diabetic person usually sits at about 95.

200 is really quite a high level but not so bad that it will make you sick. It will, however, be supplying your baby with excess glucose and cause him/her to grow bigger than normal.

This is what you need to do. First, if you are not seeing an endochronologist, make an appointment to see one. Second, test your sugar 7 times per day and record them in your monitoring book (before and after breakfast, lunch and dinner and before you go to bed. Do it 1/2 an hour before each meal and 2 hours after). Also record the amount of insulin that you are having each day. This may seem like a lot of testing but trust me, when you see the endo, they will be able to adjust your insluin and get your sugar stable much more quickly than if you dont. Third, make sure you walk for half and hour each day at the same time to get exercise. Fourth, eat carbs in moderation as they will quickly convert to energy and raise your blood sugar. Fifth, eat healthy food and look on the nutritional labels for hidden sugar such as sucrose and fructose. And last but not least, drastically limit your sugar intake and if you do have the occasional piece of chocolate or biscuit, record it in your monitoring book so that endo can see why your sugar is a little higher on certain days.

Good luck!!

Q: How can an increase in certain hormones change blood glucose levels?
How does an increase in thyroxin, insulin, and adrenaline change blood glucose levels?

A: well, the thing isn’t easy to describe or to understand, but i’ll try.

thyroxine is a hormone produced by thyroid gland, which has the purpose to increase the quantity of metabolites used by the cell, transforming them into heat and not into energy (That’s why people with hypothiroidism have a very slow metabolism). obviously, it acts also as a stimulator on cells to retrieve glucose from blood.

adrenaline is one of the hormones (it also has a neuroormonal activity) that activates the pathway which leads to the increase of cAMP levels in the cell (just like glucagon). This signifies that cells start to use all the metabolites accumulated, e.g. muscolar cell demolish glicogen to glucose, adipose cells demolish triglycerides to fatty acids and glicerol..this turns into a rapid increase of glucose level in the blood, because the body prepares to face an intense stress (that’s when we release adrenaline in the blood)

Insulin has the opposite function of glucagon (it is its “antagonist”): it stimulates the cell to accumulate as much glucose from the blood as possible. This is made by inducing the glucose carriers of the GLUT family (especially GLUT1 and 4) to reach the membrane and operate the uptake. For this reason diabete affected people, who usually do not synthesize the right quantity of insulin in their beta-cells of Langerhans pancreatic islets, face high levels of glucose in blood (hyperglycaemia).

Obviously, every hormone has several functions on different tissues, and i did not go through all of them, because i just wanted to write about the effect of this substances on glycaemia.
I hope it will be enough.
Sorry for my spelling mistakes, but i’m italian and i don’t really know how to spell certain words.

Q: Is there a diffrence in blood glucose levels from country to country?
I seem to have been rated down 4 times in an question that I answered yesterday in relation to diabetes where the blood glucose level was in the high 200’s. Maybe the levels are different for different countries. Is this the case? In Australia a normal blood suger is 4.5, not in the high 80′ to 90’s. Am I right or are other people making me out to be making up my information? The next answer to mine seems to on the same track as me.

A: Forget the ratings. They’re meaningless. Just point people to the BGL converter here: http://www.brist.plus.com/convert.htm

In the U.S. we use milligrams per deciliter. In the U.K. and Canada, they use millimoles per liter. They differ only by a factor of 18. Elsewhere, I have no idea.

U.S. norm fasting: 70 to 110 mg/dl
U.K. norm fasting: 3.9 to 6.1 mmol/l

Read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucose_tolerance_test
Ignore those who are ignorant. I get that all the time.

Q: Can lack of sleep effect blood glucose levels?
I’ve been getting less than 4 hours of sleep the last 5 days since I’m in the middle of relocating into another apartment in L.A., and you can imagine the kind of stress that is, and somehow I find it hard to go without food or “Carbs” for more than 3 hours and I get dizzy and shaky a lot faster. Can lack of sleep effect blood glucose levels?

A: It absolutely can.

Q: how likely is it that i have insulin resistance, if my random blood glucose levels are normal?
i have to wait a few weeks for an ovarian scan to rule out PCOS as the cause of my irregular, infrequent menstrual cycle, & i heard insulin resistance can cause this. i have had many blood tests done before, one a few weeks back, and my glucose levels are always normal. is it likely i could have insulin resistance despite this? i am BMI of 20.5.

A: 1337 is a bit off. You CAN have insulin resistance and still have normal glucose levels, but you cannot know without a doctor giving you a blood test.

Ask for an Insulin Levels or a C-Peptide test — this will tell you how much insulin you have in your blood. If your glucose is normal and you have an elevated Insulin or C-Peptide level, then you likely have some insulin resistance.

As to how likely? I’m not sure, I hope someone else can help you. I would guess that it would be hard to tell without more information, but going on your BMI, I’d say that it’s not too likely.

Q: Can you help me explain how the hormones glucagon and insulin work together to control blood glucose levels?
The hormone glucagon is released when glucose levels fall below normal. Explain how the hormones glucagon and insulin work together to control blood glucose levels.

(needs answer asap)

A: Glucose is the type of sugar in your blood that is the main source of energy for the body. If the glucose is too low the body, especially the brain cannot function and the person becomes sluggish, confused and faints. If the glucose is too high the person will have long term problems of diabetes like high risk of heart attacks, poor wound healing, kidney disease, etc. Insulin is a hormone released into the blood which lowers blood sugar by stimulating the muscle cells and fat cells to take in glucose from the blood to use as energy. Glucagon is a hormone which raises blood sugar by stimulating the liver to release stores of glucose into the blood. They work together to keep blood glucose from getting too high or too low.

Q: Do you take cinnamon to lower blood glucose levels?
Cinnamon is supposed to help regulate blood glucose levels. Does anyone have success with it?

A: 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

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

A: 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.

Q: Where can I buy cinnamon capsules in Sydney or online in Australia? Helps to lower blood glucose levels?
I read that cinnamon can lower blood glucose levels (bgl). My husband suffers from type 2 diabetes. Research on the web shows that cinnamon taken daily can reduce bgl’s significantly. Can anyone recommend this?

A: I know a lot of US vitamin companies do ship to Australia, not sure what shipping cost would be though. I know some diabetics who use the blood sugar product at vitabase.com, but I don’t know about their cinnamon product or whether it works.

Q: What is normal blood glucose levels for a toddler?
Hello,
can someone tell me what normal blood glucose levels are for a child who is nearly 3 years old?
Levels for a healthy child.

blood glucose levels in morning?
blood glucose levels after meals?
blodd glucose levels at bedtime?

In mmol please, eg 6 mmol, 12 etc

Thanks

A: normal ranges throughout the day should be between 4-10 mmol/l xx

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