Blood sugar and diabetes: what’s the relationship?
Most people know that diabetes and blood sugar levels are related, but knowing all the details can be the key to successful management of diabetes.
If you remember from our previous post, diabetes results when blood glucose (or “blood sugar”) is too high. Insulin plays an important role in blood glucose levels because insulin is responsible for delivering blood sugar to the body’s cells. If this delivery is unable to take place, glucose builds up in the blood, causing many health problems.
The folks over at WebMD have a nice article explaining the complicated relationship between blood sugar and your health. There’s a bit of medical jargon in the article so we picked out the most helpful information and translated it:
Blood sugar and your body
- Healthy blood sugar levels depend on the individual person.
- Blood sugar is usually lowest before meals and then increases after eating — this is your digestive and circulatory systems at work, gathering glucose energy from food and delivering it to your cells.
- With dieting, your liver manages glucose levels by turning fat and muscle into sugar when your body runs out of food to process.
- When high blood sugar levels remain in the body, they behave like “slow-acting poisons.”
- High blood sugar slowly damages cells in the pancreas, eventually preventing the cells from producing insulin.
- Excess blood sugar also leads to a hardening of blood vessels, leading to many circulatory problems.