Today we're going to explain some of the basics of hypoglycemia so stay tuned. Hey
I'm Dr. Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you'd like to truly master health
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What is hypoglycemia? Hypo means low or under and glycemia means glucose in the
blood, sugar in the blood. So hypoglycemia is low blood sugar and
then most people would think well if you've got a low blood sugar then let's
eat a bunch of sugar to get it up and that seems like a tempting idea and
that's what a lot of people do and in the short term that's going to sort of
reset your blood sugar and you feel better for a short time but in the long
run it is the worst thing that you can do and it is the thing that caused the
problem and it's the thing that perpetuates it so let's look a little
bit about the how the system works so blood sugar is measured in milligrams
per deciliter and your body likes it somewhere between eighty to a hundred
and twenty a fasting blood sugar should be eighty to a hundred with a sweet spot
somewhere like eighty five to ninety and with that level of blood sugar your body
can produce stable energy long term no huge peaks
no sudden valleys but we have steady supply that's what the brain likes
that's what your cells like and a hundred milligrams of blood sugar means
that at any given time the average person has about 1 teaspoon of glucose
or sugar circulating in their blood that's their energy supply so to speak
from from blood sugar and that's like a slow drip it's not like throwing a whole
bucket in at all at once so if your system is designed for about one T's
boon of glucose carbs at a time then it doesn't know what to do it's it's an
emergency it's a crisis if we dump a whole lot more than that in at any given
time so processed foods go into the bloodstream very very quickly so when we
say sugar we're not just talking about open up a bag of white sugar and start
spooning it into your mouth it is just as bad your blood sugar rises equally
quick from a number of other things let's take a look a coke will have eight
teaspoons of sugar a bagel 10 teaspoons of sugar fries
12 teaspoons of sugar a muffin 15 teaspoons of sugar and if you go all out
and you have three slices of pizza that's 24 teaspoons of sugar and your
body is designed to have about one teaspoon at a time that's what it knows
how to deal with so let's look at what happens first we have to understand
insulin in relation to blood sugar so when we eat whole foods like meat and
vegetables the blue line here our blood sugar is going to stay within a very
narrow range it's going to rise slowly and it's going to drop slowly and we
only need a little bit of insulin to help that sugar out of the bloodstream
and into the cell but if we eat one of these foods or any processed modern
convenience food then blood sugar is not going to stay in the hundreds it's gonna
go very very quickly in a matter of minutes not hours but minutes it's gonna
get into the 200-300 range sometimes and that's an emergency just like a diabetic
can get a coma from extremely low blood sugar they can get a coma from really
high blood sugar the brain really doesn't like those huge swings so this
is an emergency and the body is going to produce
emergency amount of insulin so you get this huge red spike of insulin to handle
all that excess blood sugar but if the insulin goes this high and it tries to
get that blood sugar out very very quickly the blood sugar is going to drop
very very quickly and do you think that at that sudden drop with that huge
amount of insulin do you think it's going to slow down and just smoothly
taper off at the ideal level no there's too much insulin in the system so it's
gonna overshoot and down here is what's called hypoglycemia and now you get
fatigue you get irritable you get shaky you lose focus you can't concentrate you
get in a bad mood until you can get your hands on some sugar because when you're
really down here when you're really far down that's an emergency too
you can't function down here and your body is screaming give me some blood
sugar and now you go to the vending machine and you have something quick a
candy bar a food bar an energy bar or something a coke chips whatever and now
we get the spike and we're on this eternal blood sugar roller coaster so
what caused the problem of hypoglycemia was the sugar because the processed
sugar creates a rollercoaster the solution even though in the moment the
thing that will be the quickest to make you feel better when you're down here is
sugar again that's the worst thing that you can do in the long run because it
perpetuates the problem the only way to solve this long-term is to stay away
from these foods learn what low glycemic index foods are meat vegetables fat and
teach your body how to get back into this range to where it knows how to
produce stable energy hope that was helpful if you
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because it can be life-saving. Thanks for watching