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‘Normal’ blood sugar levels may not be so normal after all

A new study — conducted by researchers at Stanford University in California — reveals that common foods can cause blood sugar spikes in otherwise healthy people. Paying closer attention to these spikes could prevent diabetes and some of its complications.
Blood sugar, or glucose, is the main sugar found in your blood. It comes from the food you eat, and is your body’s main source of energy. Your blood carries glucose to all of your body’s cells to use for energy.Diabetes is a disease in which your blood sugar levels are too high.
‘Normal’ blood sugar levels may not be so normal after all
Over time, having too much glucose in your blood can cause serious problems. Even if you don’t have diabetes, sometimes you may have problems with blood sugar that is too low or too high. Keeping a regular schedule of eating, activity, and taking any medicines you need can help.

If you do have diabetes, it is very important to keep your blood sugar numbers in your target range. You may need to check your blood sugar several times each day. Your health care provider will also do a blood test called an A1C. It checks your average blood sugar level over the past three months. If your blood sugar is too high, you may need to take medicines and/or follow a special diet.

woman taking her blood sugar

Over the course of a day, blood sugar levels may spike to diabetic and prediabetic levels, even in healthy individuals.

Diabetes affects over 30 million people in the United States, which is almost 10 percent of the population. An additional 84 million people have prediabetes.

Abnormal blood sugar levels are a hallmark of this metabolic disease. To measure these levels, physicians use two main methods: they either take fasting blood sugar samples, which informs them of the level of sugar in the blood at that specific point; or they measure levels of glycated hemoglobin (HbA1C).

The glycated hemoglobin test is routinely used to diagnose diabetes, and it relies on the average levels of blood sugar over a period of 3 months.

Despite their widespread use, neither of these methods can say anything about the fluctuations in blood sugar that happen over the course of a day.

So, researchers led by Michael Snyder, who is a professor of genetics at Stanford, set out to monitor these daily fluctuations in otherwise healthy individuals.

They looked at the patterns of blood sugar change after a meal and examined how these patterns vary between different people who have had the same meal.

Prof. Snyder and colleagues published the results of their research in the journal  PLOS Biology.

Three types of blood sugar variability

For their study, the researchers recruited 57 adults aged 51 years, on average, who had not been diagnosed with diabetes.

Prof. Snyder and team used novel devices called continuous glucose monitors to assess the blood sugar of the participants in their normal environment. Also, the researchers evaluated the participants’ whole-body insulin resistance and insulin secretion.

The blood sugar and metabolic measurements allowed the researchers to group the participants into three different “glucotypes,” based on the patterns of blood sugar variability.

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