60 Ways to Lower Your Blood Sugar

by Dennis Pollock

  The American Diabetes Association is a perfect example of this. For many years they declared that you are a true diabetic if your fasting blood sugar is 140 mg/dl or above. Then in the 1990s they changed their mind and reduced that number to 126. They state that if you get your blood sugar under control your fasting blood sugar should be no higher than 130 and your post-meal peaks no higher than 180. This is the target they suggest for diabetics.

  However, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists suggests that organ damage and various diabetic complications occur when blood sugar of 140 or more lingers for several hours per day. What this means is that you may be following the ADA guidelines and feeling you have your diabetes totally under control—while your organs are being slowly destroyed by blood-sugar levels in the 150s, 160s, and 170s.

  Unfortunately, the evidence is not complete, and each one of us will have to determine our targets according to the guidelines we deem reasonable. Of course you should be in consultation with your doctor on this. But allow me to point out what seems pretty obvious to me. Considering the tremendous damage high blood sugar can do to your body, if you are going to err it would be better to err on the side of caution. Let’s say you give up a few extra foods and spend a couple of hours in the kitchen each week baking low-carb breads, muffins, and waffles just to ensure that your blood-sugar peaks stay under 140. Then 20 years later you hear a definitive report that you would have been just fine with blood-sugar peaks of 170. Well, you won’t have lost all that much. But if you play it as close to the edge as you can, allowing blood-sugar peaks in the 180s and 190s, and then in 20 years end up blind with only one leg, you will have lost big-time. There are times to take risks, but in most areas of life, a conservative approach will save you all kinds of problems.

  Are there any dangers from becoming too fanatical about your diet? There are, but only the truly hard-core will ever face them. The primary danger from eating very few carbs is for those who determine to live on meat and cheese, and more meat and more cheese. These folks are getting very few vitamins and too much protein. This is far from an ideal diet, for a diabetic or anybody else. There is no reason you cannot eat vegetables and lots of them (with certain exceptions). And there are fruits that you should be able to fit into your low-carb diet without a problem. Also, don’t forget to take a good multivitamin.

  In my case, I have set my goal to keep my post-meal peaks under 140. I’m playing it safe. I like my fasting blood sugar to be under 100, but sometimes it gets a bit higher than that. The post-meal peaks are really more important than the fasting blood sugar, because if your post-meal peaks are decent, your fasting blood sugar will almost always follow suit. If you are keeping your post-meal peaks under 140 or 145, it will be nearly impossible for you to have fasting blood sugar over 120, and in most cases it will be significantly lower than that.

  Read and research all you can, and talk to your doctor. In the end it is your life, and you will need to make the decisions that are going to affect you years down the road.

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  Glycemic Index Pros and Cons

  As we note elsewhere, the glycemic index is an indicator of how quickly the carbs in various foods break down into sugar in your body. Foods like white bread and mashed potatoes break down lightning-fast, and are therefore given a high glycemic number (70 or above). Most (but not all) vegetables and beans are going to have a low number (50 or below), as they digest much more slowly in the stomach. Nuts are especially low on this scale.

  Diabetics are nearly universally advised to eat foods on the low end of the glycemic index. The slower your foods break down in your stomach, the more gradual the rise in your blood sugar. Your pancreas may have to work longer to deal with these slowly dissolving foods, but at least it is not overwhelmed by the intense, sudden overload of sugars you get when you eat a meal of potatoes, white rice, and a Moon Pie.

  This wisdom is good, as far as it goes, but there is something you need to keep in mind. Allow me to use the following illustration:

  The vast majority of ordinary Americans cannot possibly afford to pay cash for a house. If it were a matter of saving the entire amount before buying and moving into a house of their own, almost nobody would own a house. But banks have come up with a marvelous idea called a mortgage. While you could never pay $150,000 in cash for a house, you might be able to come up with $1300 per month for the next 30 years. And so you sign a contract, proudly move into your new house, and begin to live. While you have made the process manageable, you should not think that you have in any way “gotten away” with something. When the 30 years is up you will have paid every penny you owe for that house, plus interest.

  Suppose a man barely making more than the minimum wage goes to a banker, wanting a loan for a 10-million-dollar house. When the banker protests that his wages could never justify such a loan, the man indignantly declares, “Do you think I’m a fool? I’m not planning to pay the whole amount up front. I want a 30-year loan for this house!” Breaking the enormous cost of the house into 360 payments, this silly man has decided he can handle the 10-million-dollar price. But he most definitely cannot!

  So it is with the glycemic index and diabetes. By all means, gravitate toward the lower-glycemic-index foods. But don’t think that just because a food is lower on the scale, it is okay to eat as much as you want. Barley is a good example of this. Pearl barley has a GI (glycemic index) of only 22—very low on the scale. But it is by no means low in carbs. A serving has 44 grams of carbs. When you deduct the 6 grams of fiber you come out with 38 grams of carbs that your body will have to process—sooner or later. Yes, it helps that it doesn’t dump those carbs on you all at once, but they don’t just disappear. On the other hand, watermelon is high on the glycemic index because its sugars go into your bloodstream quickly. That sounds terrible. But it doesn’t tell the whole story, because watermelon is (as its name suggests) mostly water, and doesn’t have that much sugar or carbs. It really isn’t a bad food to eat, as long as you are moderate in your portion size.

  What I am saying is, “low glycemic” is not a magic bullet. As a diabetic, you cannot eat as many carbs as you once could, and the ultimate standard for the safety of a food is how many carbs it is forcing you to deal with (minus the fiber carbs). This is not to suggest that the glycemic index is unimportant. It can be a very helpful tool in enabling you to choose foods that will not overload your system and create havoc. Every diabetic and prediabetic should know about this index and use it to make wise food choices.

  If you are taking insulin, this adds a new and complex factor to your situation, and you may need to eat more often. Work on this with your doctor and monitor your blood sugar frequently.

  Along the same lines, one of the standard pieces of advice to diabetics is to eat many smaller meals throughout the day rather than three large ones. Same concept as the mortgage. Stretch out your payments. And if you are determined to eat a lot of high-carb foods, this is precisely what you should do. But if you are eating low-carb at each meal, it is normally not necessary to eat a bunch of small meals throughout the day. For example, if you eat a big breakfast of eggs and bacon, with one low-carb muffin, your blood sugar will barely budge. And since it doesn’t skyrocket upward, you don’t have to worry about crashing mid-morning and then needing some more food to keep things balanced, nor do you need to split your eggs into two meals to be kind to your pancreas. A big breakfast of four eggs and three sausages is not going to require much more insulin than a smaller breakfast of one egg and half a sausage.

  It is only when you eat higher-carb meals that you have a definite need to break those meals up into five or six per day. This will keep your pancreas and bloodstream from being overloaded, but it will also guarantee that your pancreas is working nearly nonstop throughout the day. On the other hand, when you allow four or five hours between low-carb meals, your pancreas gets a two- or three-hour rest. And a rested pancreas is a happy pancreas!

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  Not
Bad Is Pretty Good

  If you are to successfully tame the beast of diabetes, there is no getting around it. You are going to have to make some substitutions. There are a number of foods that cannot be eaten in their normal form, but can be made acceptable through certain alterations or substitutions. Some of these substitutions taste nearly as good as the original—but some do not. Here is where a little maturity and self-control becomes necessary.

  If you are willing to change your diet only if you can find something that tastes every bit as good as the original, you will never make it. Happily, some substitutions get pretty close. Low-carb pancakes (chapter 19) taste just about as good as what you get at IHOP—in fact, better in my opinion. And chocolate-drizzled cheesecake (chapter 15) can put any regular dessert to shame. Low-carb ice cream comes pretty close as well.

  But others fall a bit short. Perhaps in years to come there will be near equality in taste between high-carb foods and their low-carb substitutes, but probably not for a good while. So you have a choice: you can fuss and complain that these substitutions don’t taste as good and refuse to eat them. If you do this, you will either have to go back to the high-carb foods you love and see your blood sugar skyrocket out of control, or limit your diet severely.

  Now I’m no martyr. I don’t like pain, and I don’t like things I don’t like (to state the obvious!). Shortly after trying to go low-carb I tried some low-carb pasta that tasted just horrible. That was the last time I ever bought such nasty stuff. While on the Internet I learned about shirataki noodles, which have virtually no carbs (they’re made out of the tubers of an Asian plant). I got excited and immediately bought several bags full, sure I had discovered the pasta I could eat for the rest of my days. But when I tried them I nearly gagged. The problem really wasn’t the flavor—they hardly have a flavor. It was the texture. They have a gelatinous, rubbery texture that is downright unpalatable to many Americans. It was work to eat each bite. If that’s what it takes to eat low-carb pasta—no thanks!

  So I have my standards. But in many of the substitutions we can make, the choice is not between great-tasting and nasty; it is between really good and pretty good. And pretty good I can live with. In conquering diabetes our great need is motivation. You don’t have to read much to quickly learn what you need to do to protect yourself (reduced carb diet, exercise, maintain the proper weight). These things are affirmed by nearly everybody in nearly every diabetes book on this planet. The game is won or lost by motivation.

  If you are determined that the only low-carb bread you can accept must taste exactly like the white bread you always had your sandwiches on when you were a child, you’re not going to find it. If you insist that your low-carb muffins must taste every bit as great as the high-carb version, it’s probably not going to happen. If your strawberry shortcake must taste every bit as light and sweet, and look just like those cute little shortcakes you used to enjoy, you’d better forget about strawberry shortcake.

  This is why I push blood-sugar monitoring so strongly. If you eat a high-carb meal and don’t test your post-meal peak, you can easily delude yourself into thinking you didn’t do so badly. Perhaps your blood sugar didn’t rise too much. You took it a little easy with those mashed potatoes, and at least you didn’t have a second piece of chocolate cake. And you could have easily eaten two of those rolls, but you limited yourself to one.

  If you do not test your post-meal peak, you can go on pretending that all is well. But when you stick yourself and hold that drop of blood against the test strip, and then discover that your blood sugar has risen over 220, you have confirmed once again that your blood sugar really does have a direct correspondence to the amount of carbs you take in. The disappointment that follows a high reading is good for you! It will motivate you to do better the next time around. You can’t do much about the present state of things (other than take insulin). But you can make sure that next time you take a large salad and skip the mashed potatoes, that you eat a low-carb muffin and skip the roll.

  If you are diligent you can find all sorts of substitutions for many foods that will enable you to leave the table full and that actually taste pretty good. No, many of them won’t be quite as good as the original, but when you consider the blessing of getting a 135 post-meal reading rather than a 220, it’s well worth sacrificing a bit of extra flavor. Doing this for a meal is good, and doing it for the rest of your life is great! And if you do, chances are that the “rest of your life” may well be extended far beyond what it would otherwise amount to.

  When it comes to your health and diet, not bad is pretty good.

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  The Good Thing About Diabetes

  Strange title, isn’t it? Well, in truth there is one good thing about diabetes. Let me explain.

  When you get cancer or leukemia or any number of other diseases, there is precious little you can do other than go to the doctor and submit to whatever medicine or surgery they suggest. Then you hope they’re skilled enough, or the medicine is effective enough, or you are lucky enough. That’s pretty much it—doctors and hope.

  But with type 2 diabetes the situation is vastly different. By all means go to the doctor and cooperate with him or her in their attempts to help you. But know that you have a tremendous say in how badly this disease will affect you. And it is quite possible that having this disease could well result in your living longer than you might have otherwise, if you get serious about your diet and health.

  In many ways I don’t like to think of diabetes as a disease. If you are a type 2 diabetic, what has happened is that your body has become less efficient at processing sugar, for one reason or another. In many cases you have simply become insulin-resistant. (Your pancreas works fine at this point, but your body is no longer efficient at processing sugar.) This is not like some cancer that springs out of the blue, or pneumonia, or smallpox, typhoid, or influenza. This is more like the fact that you have to wear reading glasses in your forties, which was totally unnecessary in your twenties. Or like the fact that jogging causes all kinds of pain and stiffness for you in middle age, whereas in your youth you could run ten miles and feel just fine. The hard reality is simple but stark: our bodies don’t work as well in our latter years as they did when we were younger.

  The answer to this is equally simple: we learn to accommodate to these changes. We buy a pair of reading glasses, we quit jogging and start walking, we have sex twice a week rather than five times a week as when we were first married. We adapt.

  When it comes to diabetes there are definite adjustments that must be made. A little stiffness of the joints you may be able to put up with, but high blood sugar you must not accept. It will hurt you, it will maim you, it may blind you, and it could lop years or even decades off your life. Once you discover that your blood sugar has jumped well out of the normal range, you are going to have to get it under control quickly and keep it that way for the rest of your years. If you do so, no problem. You have a great chance of living out your years and dying “in a good old age” (to use a biblical term). But if you don’t you are in serious trouble.

  When my blood sugar started running amok and I was researching diabetes, I ran across a great account in a book called Protein Power.10 It thrilled me and gave me great hope for my situation. The book’s authors, Michael and Mary Eades, tell of a doctor, Kerin O’Dea, who was working with and studying the health issues of Australian aborigines. She located a group of them who had migrated to the U.S. and become diabetics, and convinced them to return to their home and previous lifestyle for a seven-week period. In essence they went from American couch potatoes to their former “hunter-gatherer” lifestyle, where they hunted animals and ate various vegetables and other foods growing in the wild. During these seven weeks these diabetic men were eating primarily proteins and fats with few carbohydrates.

  If I were to be checked by a doctor today, I would be told I do not have diabetes. My fasting blood sugar and daily average blood sugar are in the normal range. Yet I am convinc
ed that if I ate like many Americans eat, I could easily be a raging diabetic and be experiencing all sorts of health issues by now. I don’t like to think of myself as a diabetic; I prefer to say I have passed up a marvelous chance to become a diabetic.

  So what happened? At the end of the seven weeks these men, who had been classified as diabetics, all saw their blood sugar fall from an average of 210 mg/dl to 118 mg/dl. So were they diabetics or not? It all depended on where they lived—or to be more accurate, on how they lived and what they ate.

  The point of all this is simply to tell you that you have a huge say in how far your diabetes will go. If you are prediabetic or have already been told you are diabetic, you will in all likelihood always be susceptible to blood-sugar problems. You will never get to the place where you can have a huge ice-cream sundae with no worries. I have fully accepted that. But by being wise and a bit conservative in your diet and lifestyle, you can overcome this obstacle.

  The ball is in your court.

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  Pros and Cons of Insulin

  Insulin is the one word that is most closely associated with diabetes. The standard idea is that if you have diabetes, you don’t produce enough insulin. You will need to take a pill to stimulate more production of insulin or else take insulin shots that make up for the lack of insulin produced by your pancreas. Insulin is the good guy; a little is good and more is better. If you can just get enough insulin into your system, all will be well.