Does blood sugar matter if you don’t have diabetes?
Many of us don’t think about blood sugar until we're already sick, but maintaining stable blood sugar is vital to how you feel and your long-term health.
Most conversation about blood sugar happens in the context of diabetes—a condition characterized by chronically high glucose levels (AKA blood sugar). However, it turns out that glucose dynamics affect everyone’s health.
When blood sugar is erratic, you can experience poor energy and focus in the short term and develop serious health conditions in time, no matter how thin, fit, or seemingly healthy you are.
Your blood sugar levels contribute to common health concerns like weight gain, hormonal issues, and mental health, as well as chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and cardiovascular risk.
Understanding why blood sugar changes and why that matters is core to your daily experience and long-term health. It’s also vital to our health as a society.
Blood sugar problems are pervasive—more than a third of US adults have prediabetes, and 80% don’t know it. Eight of the top 10 leading causes of death are tied to high blood sugar and its consequences.
The good news is that you can change your blood sugar levels. In fact, this critical health lever is largely within your control, changeable with simple tweaks to your daily habits. By adjusting behaviors like diet, exercise, stress levels, and sleep, you can meaningfully move the needle on your blood sugar and take control of your health.
Read on to learn what blood sugar is, the many aspects of health it influences, how to change it, and how to measure your levels.
What is blood sugar?
Blood sugar, or glucose, is one of the primary energy sources powering cells in your body. When you eat foods with carbohydrates, your body converts them into glucose as they break down, causing your blood sugar level to rise.
Eating will nearly always cause a gradual rise in blood sugar, as most foods—even whole vegetables—have some level of carbs. That’s normal and healthy. Your body has processes for getting your glucose back to its baseline.
However, some meals can produce a “spike,” or dramatic increase in blood sugar levels. The types and quantities of foods we eat cause different degrees of spike, and how we react to food varies among people. And today, we’re bombarded with many times more sugar and refined carbohydrates (the type most likely to spike blood sugar) than our ancestors ever were; we consume nearly 10x more sugar per day than we did 200 years ago.
Lifestyle factors like exercise, sleep, and stress also impact blood sugar response. Poor sleep, for instance, can lead to higher blood sugar spikes the next day. Exercise after eating can blunt rises.
Big blood sugar spikes and subsequent crashes represent a fueling system gone awry. When spikes happen repeatedly, they can have serious impacts on health. These consequences are partly due to how glucose spikes impact insulin and can create insulin resistance.
What is insulin resistance?
When glucose levels rise, your body produces a hormone called insulin, which helps process glucose and shuttle it from the blood into the cells. Producing insulin is normal, but when glucose spikes are too big or too frequent, they cause more and more insulin production. This eventually leads to cells becoming less responsive to insulin, a state known as insulin resistance. In response, the body produces more insulin to deal with the glucose, which worsens insulin resistance, eventually leading to chronically high blood sugar. Insulin resistance is at the root of many health problems stemming from poor blood sugar regulation.
Take control of your metabolic health
Levels helps you see how food and lifestyle affect your health through macro tracking, habit-building, and customized insights and advice. Levels members can also incorporate biomarker data like real-time glucose and metabolic blood testing for an even more personalized experience. Click here to get started with Levels.
