60 Ways to Lower Your Blood Sugar

by Dennis Pollock

  There’s a lot of falsehood in the above statements, mixed with some truth. First, the truth: the type 1 diabetic is certainly suffering from a lack of insulin and will need to take insulin shots to make up for it. For one reason or another their pancreas has quit producing insulin, and high blood sugar is the inevitable result. Insulin is a powerful hormone and is the means by which our metabolic system moves sugar from the blood into our cells, providing us energy. Sugars are not supposed to hang around long in our blood; they are normally quickly dispatched by small doses of insulin, produced in and released by the pancreas.

  So, yes—insulin is vitally important. Without it, either self-produced or injected, we would quickly die. But while in its proper measure it is a lifesaver, in massive amounts it is a nightmare. Michael and Mary Dan Eades say it beautifully in their book Protein Power:

  In the appropriate amount insulin keeps the metabolic system humming along smoothly with everything in balance; in great excess it becomes a rogue hormone ranging throughout the body, wreaking metabolic havoc and leaving a trail of chaos and disease in its wake.11

  You might be thinking, That may be so, but it certainly has nothing to do with me. As a diabetic I am dealing with too little insulin, not too much of it.

  This may or may not be true. But many, if not most, type 2 diabetics are in trouble due to insulin resistance. Your body doesn’t process insulin nearly as efficiently as it used to. It requires far too much insulin to keep up with your blood sugar. The fact is, you may have considerably more insulin filling your bloodstream today than you did ten years ago, but it is still not enough to deal with your inefficient insulin-processing ability. Thus in the case of many early-stage diabetics, they have a threefold problem: 1) They process insulin poorly. 2) Their pancreas is forced to put out huge amounts of insulin, and that excess insulin is causing all sorts of other problems, such as restricted arteries and high blood pressure. 3) Their pancreas is being worn out long before its time and will eventually give out altogether.

  As an unwanted bonus, bodies that are daily saturated with insulin almost always produce too much cholesterol. This explains the puzzling phenomenon that occurs in so many case histories of men and women who have gone to a low-carb diet, learned to eat meats, cheese, eggs, and fats without guilt, and found their cholesterol levels actually decreasing. It makes no sense until you realize that low-carb results in reduced insulin production, and that a high-carb diet that constantly results in excess insulin production is a major culprit in high cholesterol.

  Both diabetes and heart disease are often results of hyperinsulinemia (a condition in which the bloodstream is constantly saturated with high blood sugar and too much insulin), many Americans who have diabetes often suffer from high blood pressure as well. The same high-carb, overweight, couch-potato lifestyle that makes diabetes a likelihood also carries high blood pressure and heart disease in its wake.

  Nor does it follow that once your pancreas goes and you can no longer produce any significant insulin, this issue no longer relates to you. Even if you must take insulin shots, you have a significant say in how much insulin you will need to take. Stay slim, eat a low-carb diet, and exercise regularly, and you will require far less insulin than if you reverse these things. The person who is 60 pounds overweight and constantly eats pies, doughnuts, and pasta is fooling themselves if they think they can take a quick insulin shot, and all will be well. Lack of self-control is forcing them to take insulin in levels that are far too high. Sure, the insulin can combat the blood sugar, and keep the numbers at a reasonable level, but while doing that it is producing untold damage to other areas of the person’s overall health.

  Of course diabetes is a complex disease that can result from many causes. We cannot suggest that hyperinsulinemia is the only reason people get diabetes. Insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia go hand in hand, and trying to figure out which came first is like the chicken-or-the-egg debate. Regardless of the first cause, there is no question that having your bloodstream constantly overloaded with insulin is not healthy. On the other hand, we must have insulin to remain alive, so if your doctor prescribes injections for you, take them gladly.

  Every meal you eat is making requirements on your pancreas, calling for it to produce precise amounts of insulin. A meal of spaghetti and French bread, followed by a large slice of apple pie with ice cream, is calling for a deluge. A garden salad with an avocado calls for a tiny squirt. By choosing what goes and does not go into your mouth, you are choosing whether your body, flooded with sugar, will spend the next few hours overloaded with insulin acting as a “rogue hormone”—or whether the resulting blood sugar will be quickly dispatched by a small amount of insulin, doing the job for which it was created and quickly disappearing.

  44

  Low-Carb Isn’t Really Low-Carb

  Throughout this book I have been emphasizing the need for a low-carb diet. I know this sounds pretty strange, but in this chapter I want to contradict myself. In truth, the low-carb diet I am advocating isn’t really low-carb at all. Let me explain.

  The term low-carb makes it sound like you are on some type of bizarre diet far removed from normal eating. You feel like you are being forced by your blood-sugar problems to eat like an alien from another planet. It seems that what you are doing is not natural, not normal, and runs counter to humanity’s eating habits from the dawn of civilization.

  Wrong, wrong, wrong! The truth is that the way most Americans eat today is what is strange and bizarre. It is they that are out of step, not you. Consider the common soda (take your pick: Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, 7-Up, you name it). Until recently you drank sodas all throughout your life. Your momma drank sodas. Your momma’s momma drank sodas. What could be more natural and more American than “the pause that refreshes,” slurping down a good old 16-ounce Coca-Cola (with its 54 grams of high-fructose corn syrup)?

  However, your short lifetime and the life of your parents and grandparents represent a tiny drop of the history of men and women on this planet. The colas were first created in the 1880s and didn’t become commonplace until the twentieth century. This means that for thousands of years of man’s recorded history, there were no sodas. The surpassing drink of choice (and necessity) was, you guessed it, water. This same idea holds true for Twinkies, Trix cereal, candy bars, rocky road ice cream, cinnamon rolls, white bread, white rice, and scores of other nasty, colon-clogging, blood-sugar-raising, insulin-demanding foods that we often consider perfectly normal and natural. Although most of you cannot remember a time when these things didn’t beckon to you from the grocery-store shelves, they are absolute newcomers to the scene of human existence.

  Of course various sweet confections have been baked for many centuries, but these were primarily the food of the royalty and the rich (who suffered for their indulgence more than the poor folks who envied them). Poor to middle-class people ate rough whole-grain bread, meat (when they could get it), vegetables, and fruits when they were in season. Not only that, but if you had to eat the portion size they lived on from day to day, you would think yourself starving. They never sat down at an IHOP restaurant and ate a huge stack of white-flour pancakes smothered with sugary syrup. Had they tasted a cola they would probably have spit it out; it would have tasted sickeningly sweet to them, at least at first.

  They had their health issues of course. Without antibiotics, modern medicine, and skilled surgeons many of them died prematurely. But if they did manage to live to old age they rarely suffered from heart disease or diabetes. They might be killed by a plague or an infection, but few died from skyrocketing blood sugar. In essence most of these folks were on a “low-carb” diet. They ingested far fewer carbs and sugar than the average American today, got far more exercise (mainly through work), and were generally considerably slimmer. The diet you call “low-carb” was normal for them. The lifestyle you might consider a burden was for them regular living.

  It’s not really the case that you are on a low-carb diet. It is that m
ost Americans are on a high-carb diet. No, let me take that back—most Americans are on a soaring, towering, health-destroying, pancreas-killing, life-shortening, sugar-gorging, stratospheric-carb diet.

  At this point you may be asking, “What’s the point? You are just talking semantics here. I still have to cut out sweets, exercise regularly, and watch my weight.” Yes, you do, but the point is an important one. As long as you consider your diet and lifestyle some kind of abnormal one—some sort of cosmic punishment you don’t deserve—you will have a hard time embracing these changes for the rest of your days. You will look enviously at your friend who eats everything they want and never worries about it, and wonder, Why me? The reality is that they are the odd one, not you. So the next time you pass on the dessert and drink water rather than soda, and are tempted to feel sorry for yourself—don’t. You are not some miserable, unlucky person being forced to make terrible sacrifices and live abnormally just to survive. You’re just doing the reasonable thing. You are living as you should have lived all along. It just took you a while to wise up, right?

  45

  Counteracting the Sedentary Life

  In earlier times most people were busy and active throughout their days. If you could go back in a time machine to the 1500s and tell a typical laborer about today’s jobs, where you sit at a desk and tap on buttons with your fingers and read things off a flat screen all day long, they would think you were crazy. But if they could believe you they would certainly be jealous. It would sound too good to be true—to engage in “work” that involved so little physical exertion.

  In America we have become a nation of sitters. We sit while we work, sit while we eat, and sit while we drive to and from work and eating. And when we go home we sit some more as we watch television and surf the Internet for hours. In our guilt (and obesity) we may try to exercise a bit to make up for our sedentary lifestyles, but most folks fail to make this a lifetime habit. And usually the ones who do manage to exercise regularly are the ones who are doing it for their looks rather than their health.

  Of course you could quit your high-paying job and become a migrant laborer, but for most of us that is impractical and not very appealing. The other choice is to counteract our many, many hours of sitting with a 30- to 40-minute exercise routine that we are willing to do as long as our health allows it. (And by starting early in life, we make it more likely that our health will allow it for a good, long time!)

  The good news is that you don’t have to exercise a huge amount of time to make up for all that sitting. If we had to exercise one hour to make up for every hour we sit, we’d all be in trouble. We don’t. Research has shown that if we can exercise 30 to 40 minutes a day for around four or five days each week, we will improve our health immensely—and this includes our blood sugar. But let me depart from blood sugar for a moment and share with you an experience I had with my blood pressure. After having borderline, slightly elevated blood pressure for years, finally my doctor put me on a low-dosage medication to bring it down. I faithfully took the little pills, and to my wonder, they did the job beautifully. I went from around 138/90 to an average of 120/78 very quickly. I stayed at that level, frequently monitoring my blood pressure.

  Then I went on a trip to Nigeria. I didn’t take my blood-pressure monitor with me, so when I returned a couple of weeks later, I discovered that my blood pressure had gone back up to its former, higher level. While in Nigeria I hadn’t exercised at all, and I now suspected that this might have something to do with the higher blood pressure. When I returned home, the treadmill at our small apartment fitness center was not working, so I went for walks instead of my usual routine. This brought my blood pressure down a bit but not as before.

  After going to the doctor I was given a second pill to take. I was not eager to be taking two pills, and it so happened that the treadmill was fixed the next day, so I decided to hold off on the second pill until I could do my normal routine on the treadmill. Getting back on the treadmill forced me to work a bit harder (my walks tend to be pretty leisurely), and sure enough, within a couple of days I was having excellent blood pressure readings with only the first pill. This encouraged me so much that I stepped up the degree of difficulty on the treadmill, and started getting blood pressure readings even better (107/76). I never did take the second pill. After a while I was able to get off all blood-pressure medication.

  The experts tell us that exercise should be of sufficient intensity to get our heart rate up, but not too high. Most recommend that you should get your heart rate to around 75 percent of its maximum. The Mayo Clinic has a website where you can type in your age, and it will tell you the heart-rate range you should target. Basically what all this heart-rate business means is that your exercise should get you sweating a bit and breathing somewhat more heavily than you normally do, but not gasping for air and feeling like you’re going to faint.

  The moral of the story is a simple one. It’s something that doctors and health experts have been telling us all along—exercise really does make a difference. It also affects your blood sugar. An article in the journal of the American Medical Association cited a study showing that the rate that diabetes normally develops in women was cut in half for those who walk regularly. I have noticed that when I go several days without exercise my fasting blood sugar starts drifting upward.

  I am not talking about checking your blood sugar before you exercise, and then checking it afterward and seeing a dramatic decrease. This can happen, but also your blood sugar can increase a bit, as a result of the body sensing a need for energy and producing additional glucose. This is particularly an issue with very strenuous exercise. But in the long run, the exercise will go a long way in decreasing your average blood-sugar levels. Your metabolism will become more efficient, your circulation greatly improved, and you will be healthier when you make exercise a normal part of most of your days (at least four times each week, at most six).

  There is a price to be paid for all our sitting, computer work, and TV watching. We can either pay for it with heart disease, obesity, and diabetes, or pay for it with about two to two and a half hours of moderately vigorous exercise weekly. Choose the latter.

  46

  Do-It-Yourself Sweetening

  Those rare individuals who manage to save money and live on less than their income become experts at what my mom used to call cutting corners. They find all sorts of ways to save a dollar here, two dollars there, and so forth. These are the folks who don’t sweat it when their washer goes out, or their air-conditioner quits working in the middle of July, or their tooth starts aching. They have disciplined themselves to save on the small everyday items, and so they have the resources for emergencies.

  We need to be just as frugal in saving carbs as in saving dollars. Yes, it will help tremendously to cut out the big-purchase items, like refusing that sugar-drenched French silk pie or not emulating your buddy when he orders a giant-sized soda to wash down his large order of french fries. When you have begun routinely saying no to such carb atrocities, you are on the road to blood-sugar health. But you have not arrived until you have learned to spare yourself carbs in lesser ways as well.

  Some people like their strawberries sweetened, and you can buy frozen strawberries that have extra sugar added in. This is hardly necessary, but if you really want some extra-sweet strawberries, don’t go out and buy the sweetened ones. Buy a package that has no sugar added and sweeten them yourself with your preferred non-sugar sweetener.

  One of the ways you can do this is to avoid buying things that have been pre-sweetened. Food suppliers are fully aware that in most cases the public prefers sweet to not sweet. There is no law that says that ketchup must be sweet, but who can imagine it without some sweetness? Pickle relish does come in non-sweet varieties, but many people would almost gag if they made their tuna-salad sandwiches without sweetened relish.

  One simple solution is to always buy the non-sweet versions wherever possible. (In the case of ketchup, you could substit
ute tomato paste.) But by the time most of us become insulin-resistant, we have been using sweet condiments and sauces for four or five decades, and going cold-turkey is an appalling thought. Happily it is not necessary. One secret to saving carbs in smaller ways is to buy various products in the unsweetened version and then sweeten them yourself with a sugar-free sweetener. Here are some examples:

  Teriyaki sauce: I love chicken teriyaki, but for a diabetic it requires some modifications. First, that bed of rice that the vegetables and chicken rest on must be brown rice, and it must be about half of what most people prefer. Turn the white to brown, cut the normal portion in half, and you are in business. Well, almost in business. The other thing is to do away with that sweet sauce most of us prefer. Go and check out all the various teriyaki sauces on the grocer’s shelf and buy one with the least number of sugar/carbs. Then, when you are about to pour some over your teriyaki, put the necessary portion in a bowl (I usually dilute it with water to cut down on the salt) and mix in a little stevia, Splenda, or other artificial sweetener. It should only take one packet. Voilà, you have a sweet teriyaki sauce that does nothing to raise your blood sugar. Then drench your teriyaki with it and enjoy your meal. Your “savings” aren’t tremendous, but in combination with other smart choices, they can make a real difference.

  Barbecue sauce: Barbecue sauces didn’t use to contain that much sugar, but over the years the popular ones have gotten sweeter and sweeter. To keep your carb count down, go out and buy the least sugary barbecue sauce available and do the same with it as is described with the teriyaki sauce.

  I know this isn’t profound, but it works! You can do this with spaghetti sauce, if you like a sweetened version (Prego brand is notorious for their sweetened spaghetti sauce), and pickle relish. Buy the blandest pickle relish on the shelf, and mix in one packet of stevia or Splenda with the other ingredients the next time you make a couple of sandwiches, and you’ll have your sweet tuna-salad sandwich without the sugar carbs.