The Dangers of Hypoglycemia

by Brazos Minshew, TriVita's Chief Science Officer

What is hypoglycemia?

There is an epidemic sweeping the world. It is an epidemic of obesity. As obesity increases, the risk of diabetes increases. The two conditions reflect each other in such a mirror-image proportion that some have started using the term “diabesity” when discussing them.

How did the epidemic begin? What are the warning signs? Most importantly, how can we break the cycle of diabesity and reclaim our health?

Today’s hypoglycemics…

We used to say that the people with hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) today will be the people with type 2 diabetes tomorrow. Over the past 40 years that has proven true.

Hypoglycemia begins with too much sugar in your bloodstream for you to handle (hyper-glycemia), followed by a rapid drop in blood sugar levels (hypo-glycemia) when your metabolism finally catches up. This “yo-yo” blood sugar creates the symptoms you feel. You will eventually become type 2 diabetic if this continues. But, we get years of warning messages before this happens.

So, to halt type 2 diabetes we must learn to listen to the message of hypoglycemia. We need a sound strategy to control blood sugar before we exhaust our internal resources and slip into type 2 diabetes.

In people with type 1 diabetes, hypoglycemia may be fatal if untreated. The treatment is pretty simple: sugar. If your blood sugar is too low, doesn’t it make sense to take some sugar and raise it? It might sound like a good strategy but in the kind of hypoglycemia that leads to type 2 diabetes, it is like adding fuel to the fire, and the problem only gets worse.

Sugar, including any high glycemic-index foods such as alcohol, bread or pasta, is the cause of hypoglycemia, not the cure. In the long run, high glycemic foods can lead to hypoglycemia, obesity and type 2 diabetes.

A little misleading

Actually, the term “hypoglycemia” is inappropriate. The better term is “dysglycemia,” meaning disrupted blood sugar metabolism. You see, hypoglycemia that leads to obesity and type 2 diabetes is actually a demonstration of your body’s attempt to adapt to impossible circumstances. Humans were never meant to eat this much sugar and starch, endure this much stress and be this sedentary. The fact that we survive at all is a miracle.

To adapt, our body responds to the overload of sugar and stress by producing more insulin to take the toxic level of sugar out of our bloodstream and into storage in our liver, muscles and fat cells. Because we are sedentary, our muscles suffocate with all the sugar and become resistant to the insulin. Now, only the liver and fat cells are available to receive the sugar. So we get fatty livers and fat stomachs.

Eventually, even these mechanisms fail and our pancreas simply wears out. The result is type 2 diabetes. We may even become insulin-dependent.

What to do

Three steps are immediately necessary to help stop the diabesity trend of hypoglycemia:

Stop all added sugar and starch in your diet
Increase activity every day
Reduce the impact of stress

For diet recommendations, there are three major plans that can help you:

A low-fat diet (e.g., Dr. Ornish “Eat More, Weigh Less”)
A moderate-fat Mediterranean diet (e.g., Dr. Gutterson “The Sonoma Diet”)
A high-protein diet (e.g., Dr. Agatston “The South Beach Diet”)

There are many exercise routines that can help. You may want to start by simply walking every day. Fifteen minutes is a start. Thirty minutes is better, but an hour or more every single day is best. A Wall Street Journal article recently pointed out that we should increase our exercise as we age, going “farther, longer and faster.” Hypoglycemia, obesity and diabetes are serious conditions and require a serious response.

What about supplements? I’m glad you asked! TriVita’s GlucoManage® can help your body reduce carbohydrate, sugar and alcohol cravings. It also helps re-sensitize your cells to insulin to balance blood sugar. Leanology® Capsules can literally extract fat from storage and burn it as fuel. Adaptogen 10 Plus® can help your body reduce the impact of stress and Sublingual B-12 helps reduce dangerous levels of MMA, strongly linked to type 2 diabetes.

To avoid your personal diabesity epidemic tomorrow, address the signs of hypoglycemia today!