Can you answer Ronda A’s question about Diabetes?:

I’ve had really bad acne for almost ten years now. i’ve also been suffering from hypoglycemia for alittle while. I think I have some sort of chemical imbalance, or hormonal imbalance.

Medications For Type 2 Diabetes

Can you answer h.marieh’s question about Diabetes?:

I feel I may have hypoglycemia and have no health insurance. I almost fainted this morning due to low blood sugar. I ate chocolate and had a coke then was fine. This has happened before and I am tired of it, as it isn’t safe.

Treatment For Type 1 Diabetes

Refined foods, the very foods hypoglycemics should not be eating, now make up more than 50% of the modern diet.

Pastas, white flour and bread, most breakfast cereals, polished rice, are all refined carbohydrates and have a similar effect on your low blood sugar levels (hypoglycemia) as does sugar itself.

White sugar is ‘pure’ as the advertisements have described it, but it is so pure that it contains no enzymes, minerals and vitamins. It is nearly 100% sucrose which is void of any health giving food.

It has to rob the missing enzymes, minerals and vitamins from reserves in your body or from other food you eat. The colour of molasses shows how much goodness has been extracted. It tells us which minerals and vitamins are missing in sugar itself. So these elements need to be robbed to allow metabolism of sugar.

To stop eating sugar is not as simple as cutting sugar out of tea or coffee because a look at labels in the supermarket show that it is in a surprising number of products. When shopping check for the following on the packaging: sugar, sugar syrup, glucose, corn syrup, invert sugar, cane syrup, natural sweetener, dextrose and sucrose.

There is no nourishment in sugar and, especially with the vast quantities in modern diets, should be avoided by hypoglycemics. In normal food there are natural starches and sugars, along with proteins, fats, minerals and enzymes.

These slowly release sugar into the blood as fuel when the body and brain requires it. Sugar not only leaches the body of essential vitamins and minerals but also sets off the up and down cycles of blood sugar levels (hypoglycemia).

The constant imbalance, over time, causes hypoglycemia. This must be seen as a warning before diabetes, heart and kidney diseases take hold.

The other big areas where sugar is found in the western diet is in actual candy, chocolates and cold drinks. Today Americans consume 150 lbs of sugar per person per year; up from 125 lbs in 1980.

So, if you thought obesity had become more noticeable in the recent past, it is because it has. A quarter of Americans now eat a ½ lb of sugar per day. They are mainly unaware of this as it is in the vast quantities of processed foods they consume.

Excess sugar and refined products lead to the well known hypoglycemic symptoms of lack of concentration, irritablility and unprovoked anxieties, which if ignored, lead to insomnia and exhaustion.

But it needn’t develop like this. With a little research we can investigate our own symptoms. There is now a lot of research published on Hypoglycemia (low blood sugar levels). Since no-one else is going to help you, it is your responsibility to seek out this information especially as it is now readily available.



Thanks to Noel Glass for contributing this article to our Diabetes blog:

Information On Diabetes Mellitus

Can you answer ya7te7uja02’s question about Diabetes?:

I have Type 2 and I take metformin (Glucophage) and glimepiride (Amaryl), in addition to 30 IU of 24-hour insulin (Lantus) and about 100 IU of rapid acting insulin (Humalog 2-3 hr) each day.

My blood glucose is not controlled really well. It skates along in the 150-200 mg/dL range.

If I am to get my blood glucose under control, how often can I expect to have a hypoglycemic episode?

Implantable Insulin Pump

You probably don’t worry very much about hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) because so far nothing serious has happened to you.

In fact, people go for many years coping with the symptoms of hypoglycemia - dizziness, mood swings, food cravings and lack of concentration. They ignore these symptoms as they come and go.

The episodes pass and the individual feels things are back to normal. After all, he justifies, we all have family, work and more pressing worries. Male or female, we probably don’t know enough about the course of ill health. Besides, what do we know about the affects of blood sugar - low or high?

Until one day it hits us hard and we think the disease has come out of the blue. The problem with hypyglycemia is that the serious diseases like diabetes and heart problems develop slowly but surely over many years.

Before this happens we attend a doctor’s surgery. But we don’t seem to be successful in explaining our everyday symptoms: “A fuzzy feeling in the head,” “can’t concentrate”.

It’s a part of ageing and is not a separate disease, the doctor says. He ends by saying take an aspirin, see if it gets worse, and rest.

The last point you certainly hope for since one of the symptoms of low blood sugar is insomnia. The two go hand in hand and there is no proper rest until you make changes.

The symptoms that took you to the doctor are no longer causing problems. No wonder doctors can’t put their fingers on a diagnosis.

But then it returns. This is how hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) works as it is not a steady state.

In fact it is the food you eat. What you ate last night and for breakfast affects the mood swings and irritableness.

What is happening is that through eating refined foods, pastries and chocolate and drinking caffeine your blood sugar levels periodically crash. These lows demand instant relief and we indulge our food cravings, often with more doughnuts and sweets.

The cycle is endless and we soon think it is normal to lack memory and concentration. We daydream about the day we will retire because it is easier to cope with hypoglycemic effects when we don’t have to work.

With no help from anyone, we’re alone. Even our family begins to doubt our eternal jibber-jabber.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. With careful planning and research we can investigate our own symptoms. There are many resources available to access the numerous studies on low blood sugar.

Because you are not likely to get a lot of help formally, you should see it as your responsibility to understand pre-diabetes or hypoglycemia before the more serious illnesses take hold.



Thanks to Noel Glass for contributing this article to our Diabetes blog:

Medications For Type 2 Diabetes