blood-sugar trivia

It's a dangerous world out there if you're diabetic. Any number of things can spike your blood sugar. Simply by waking up in the morning, you can experience what's called the dawn phenomenon, in which your blood sugar is naturally high in the morning (or whenever you wake up). That's actually true for diabetics and non-diabetics alike. Diet drinks, combined with insulin resistance, can spike your blood sugar: insulin lowers blood sugar (it also, unfortunately, aids in the storage of fat), but insulin resistance ensures that insulin, when produced, is ignored by the body. In fact, eating pretty much anything can spike your blood sugar, and then it becomes a matter of how long it takes to come down from that spike. Healthy, non-diabetic people can return to normal within an hour of eating, give or take, but insulin-resistant people take several hours to recover. Another thing that can spike your blood sugar is, strangely enough, fasting. Why? Because your body has a suite of responses to food-deprivation. Among these responses is gluconeogenesis, in which the liver produces sugar as your glycogen levels go down. Dehydration can also spike your blood sugar because lack of water concentrates the sugar in your blood. No matter where you turn, if you're diabetic, you have to worry about just about everything ruining your blood sugar. Eat healthy and don't let yourself become insulin-resistant. It's a hard pit to crawl out of.