What Is A Normal Blood Sugar Level?

What Is a Normal Blood Sugar Level?

The aim of diabetes treatment is to bring blood sugar (“glucose”) as close to normal as possible. What is a normal blood sugar level? And how can you achieve normal blood sugar?
First, what is the difference between “sugar” and “glucose”? Sugar is the general name for sweet carbohydrates that dissolve in water. “Carbohydrate” means a food made only of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.
There are various different kinds of sugars. The one our body uses most is called “glucose.” Other sugars we eat, like fructose from fruit or lactose from milk, are converted into glucose in our bodies. Then we can use them for energy. Our bodies also break down starches, which are sugars stuck together, into glucose.
When people talk about “blood sugar,” they mean “blood glucose.” The two terms mean the same thing.
In the U.S., blood sugar is normally measured in milligrams of glucose per deciliter of blood (mg/dl). A milligram is very little, about 0.00018 of a teaspoon. A deciliter is about 3 1/3 ounces.
In Canada and the United Kingdom, blood sugar is reported in millimoles/liter (mmol/L). You can convert Canadian or British glucose levels to American numbers if you multiply them by 18. This is useful to know if you’re reading comments or studies from England or Canada. If someone reports that their fasting blood glucose was 7, you can multiply that by 18 and get their U.S. glucose level of 126 mg/dl.
What are normal glucose numbers? They vary throughout the day. (Click here for a blood sugar chart.) For someone without diabetes, a fasting blood sugar on awakening Continue reading

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Type 1.5 Diabetes: An Overview

Type 1.5 Diabetes (T1.5D) is also known as Latent Autoimmune Diabetes of Adults (LADA). LADA is considered by some experts to be a slowly progressive form of Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) while other experts in the field consider it a separate form of Diabetes.
LADA or T1.5D is sometimes thought of as T1D that is diagnosed in adults over the age of 30—T1D is commonly diagnosed in children and younger adults. T1.5D is often found along with Type 2 Diabetes (T2D): up to 25% of individuals with T1.5D also have characteristics of T2D.1 This is sometimes called “double diabetes”.
Individuals with T1.5D are all eventually dependent on insulin for treatment, and have a very high risk of requiring insulin within months or years (up to six years) after the initial diagnosis. This is in contrast to people with T1D—these people tend to need insulin within days or weeks of diagnosis.2 Individuals diagnosed with T2D relatively rarely require insulin treatment. Current recommendations are to treat individuals with T1.5D immediately with insulin, though this is not universally accepted (see below).
The Causes of T1.5D
Just as with other forms of diabetes, we don’t truly understand the underlying cause(s) of T1.5D. There are autoimmune components in Types 1, 1.5 and 2 diabetes with some overlap in the types of antibodies formed, so it is clear that as in T1D, the immune system has become “confused” and begins to act against the beta cells of the pancreas—the source of the insulin needed to control blood sugars. Both T1D and T1.5D have antibodies to glutamic acid decarboxylase or an Continue reading

Blood Sugar Levels for Adults With Diabetes

Each time you test your blood sugar, log it in a notebook or online tool or with an app. Note the date, time, results, and any recent activities:
What medication and dosage you took
What you ate
How much and what kind of exercise you were doing
That will help you and your doctor see how your treatment is working.
Well-managed diabetes can delay or prevent complications that affect your eyes, kidneys, and nerves. Diabetes doubles your risk for heart disease and stroke, too. Fortunately, controlling your blood sugar will also make these problems less likely.
Tight blood sugar control, however, means a greater chance of low blood sugar levels, so your doctor may suggest higher targets. Continue reading

How Much Should I Eat Daily To Control My Blood Sugar Levels With Diabetes?

The types of food you eat, when you eat them, the timing of medications and even physical activity levels can all affect blood sugar levels. A good component to type 2 diabetes management is keeping your blood sugar levels under control as best as possible. The road to management can be a challenging and winding one.
The day-to-day efforts you put in trying to ensure you maintain your target blood sugar levels, can sometimes seem like minute-to-minute efforts.
You’ve learned how to check your blood sugar, what medications you should take, recommendations on what you should eat, but have you learned what foods work best for you and your blood sugar levels. Blood sugar levels are the one consistent factor in diabetes management that everyone, including doctors can agree require more information on how to manage them more effectively.
What’s The Big Deal on Blood Sugars?
Type 2 diabetes happens when your body is no longer sensitive to the insulin, or it begins to develop a delayed response to the way insulin is secreted to change your blood sugar levels.
Beyond the complications associated with diabetes, high blood sugar levels can gradually do damage to all the blood vessels in the body. Over a longer period of time, these elevated blood sugars and damage can lead to a bigger problem of the loss in sensation throughout the body, particularly in the legs and feet.
This condition is known as neuropathy. Deterioration of your eyesight, reduced kidney function and an elevated risk for heart disease are also potential complications.
For more information read these guides:
Epis Continue reading

10 Silent Diabetes Symptoms You Might Be Missing

Diabetes has plenty of early signs, but they're subtle enough that you might not notice.
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"It's not like you wake up one day and all of a sudden you're thirsty, hungry, and [going to the bathroom] all the time," says Melissa Joy Dobbins, RD, a certified diabetes educator in Illinois and a spokesperson for the American Association of Diabetes Educators. "It picks up gradually." Indeed, "most people are unaware that they have diabetes in its early or even middle phases," says Aaron Cypess, MD, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and staff physician at Joslin Diabetes Center. Just because you're not keyed in doesn't mean you're immune from problems associated with diabetes, he adds. The longer you go without controlling diabetes, the greater your risk for heart disease, kidney disease, amputation, blindness, and other serious complications. "We recommend that people with risk factors for diabetes, such as a family history or being overweight, get evaluated on a regular basis," Dr. Cypess says. If you've been feeling off, talk to your doctor about getting a simple blood test that can diagnose the disease. And pay attention to these subtle diabetes symptoms and signs. Try these simple tricks for living well with diabetes from people who actually have it.
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When you have diabetes, your body becomes less efficient at breaking food down into sugar, so you have more sugar sitting in your bloodstream, says Dobbins. "Your body gets rid of it by flushing it out in the urine." So going to the bathroom a lot cou Continue reading