Blood Glucose Level
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I got some routine labs yesterday, and my glucose was only 64. I don’t have diabetes. I had just eaten a big meal of carbs and protein about an hour before the test. You think this is something to be concerned about? I was surprised by the result.
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Yes, it is of concern as I find myself feeling the effects of adrenalin below s blood sugar level of 70. To be sure, I put my threshold at 80.
Is this value taken after a 10 hr fast, usually taken in the morning after a night of sleep?
Did you take the BG test using s glucometer yourself? If so, don't rely on China glucometers. They're POS.
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Thank you for the reply.
It was a blood glucose test taken from my arm by the lab at my physician’s office. It was taken about an hour or two after eating beef, corn tortillas, and fruit. I don’t understand why it was so low.
I do routinely have the high adrenaline symptoms, even after eating.
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You can request a 5 hr oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) from your physician. It is by far better than using the HbA1c test, which has no diagnostic value at all. Ray Peat has criticized that test as well. It's convenient but many doctors I normally would respect use it, such as Dr. Tom Cowan. It just betrays their shallow understanding of blood sugar regulation when they leave testing in the hands of voodoo science witch doctors, sacrificing utility for the sake of convenience.
However, the test may have been bsoleted and at best, replaced by a useless 2 or 3 hr OGTT. I just do my own test at home. Because of your hypoglycemic condition, you may be at risk of fainting during the test as it maybcsuse your blood sugar to drop to very low levels.
You may simply start going cold turkey on PUFAs, as that would be a surefire way of making your body better absorb and metabolize sugar, and you would need 4 years to clear your system of PUFAs.
In the mean time, you would need to manage your intake of macros by eating complex carbohydrates such as sweet potatoes together with marbled meat, which also contains fats, and eat smaller quantities more often (grazing). This way, it takes longer for your food to be digested and assimilated, so the assimilation of sugar will be slow and steady and keep your blood sugar from spiking, which would keep insulin from being secreted, and this will keep your blood sugar from dropping due to the insulin not causing blood sugar to be converted to fats by the liver.
See if you can get blood sugar values eating sweet potatoes instead of tortillas, retaining the rest such as beef.
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Up until a year or two ago I was only eating around 150g of carbs per day, then I upped it to 250 - 300. I was also intermittent fasting, and my fasting blood glucose was at 100.
Do you think I should reduce the carbs down again until the pufas are further removed from my system?
Looking back it’s odd. I was eating fewer carbs, and only two or three meals per day, but I could easily go seven or eight hours during the day without eating. Now I can feel my blood sugar crash after only a couple of hours.
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@Mallard6146 said in Blood Glucose Level:
Up until a year or two ago I was only eating around 150g of carbs per day, then I upped it to 250 - 300. I was also intermittent fasting, and my fasting blood glucose was at 100.
See if you can maintain your current daily carb intake, but break it into more meals. Say, instead of 3 meals a day, you take 6 meals at half the quantity each time.
You can do without IF, as that can put you in a stressful high cortisol state when you are likely to go into a low blood sugar state.
Do you think I should reduce the carbs down again until the pufas are further removed from my system?
No, as ridding your body of PUFA takes a while. In the meantime, you still need enough macros and calories for energy. It's important to maintain enough carb intake spread over meals so your blood sugar does not spike so high and start to roller coasted to low levels. You want to have lower spikes and higher lows in the fluctuations of blood sugar, and more frequent but smaller meals can help with that.
Looking back it’s odd. I was eating fewer carbs, and only two or three meals per day, but I could easily go seven or eight hours during the day without eating. Now I can feel my blood sugar crash after only a couple of hours.
When you're eating less at a time, you won't be getting your blood sugar to spike at levels that trigger an insulin response. Without that insulin response, your blood sugar won't be driven to hypoglycemic lows by the liver, and you won't feel hungry or sleepy or sick.
But you are also getting too little nutrition to your body and that eventually will have consequences as you are depriving your body of nutrients, especially your sugar-hungry brain.
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Thanks for this, I do think frequent feedings will be better.
I’ve been mostly eating two large high carb meals and one snack per day. Those gigantic meals were probably flooding my system with insulin.
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As you eat smaller meals, you produce less insulin. Less insulin production means less inhibition of lipolysis, as insulin inhibits lipolysis.
Allowing lipolysis is actually a good thing, contrary to the way lipolysis is seen generally in this forum. It's because as fat stores are turned into fatty acids and metabolized, you lose weight and you lose PUFA stores.
In allowing lipolysis, you actually speed up the time for your PUFA stores to be gone from your system.
Knowing that PUFA is being metabolized and that lipid peroxidation will occur, you just have to take vitamin E during this time to keep lipid peroxidation at a minimum. The vitamin E with plenty plenty of alpha isomer, alpha tocopherol will be very helpful.
Also, supplementing from 1 to 3 tbsp of VCO will help lessen the harmful effects of PUFA being released through lipolysis.
Note that I am not advocating increasing the rate of lipolysis, but simply allowing lipolysis to occur by not letting too much insulin to get in the way by its inhibition of lipolysis. Lipolysis and the eventual oxidation of the released fatty acids from lipolysis is just part of the body's way of producing energy, as both sugar metabolism and fat metabolism are used by the body to produce energy.
However, sugar metabolism has to be predominant over fat metabolism. Fat metabolism allows the body to conserve its sugar stores for emergency situations when we are deprived of food, to keep the organs like brain fed with sugar, which the brain needs to function.
