What really causes Hypoglycemia in people?

Question

Some say too high of a diet in carbohydrates and anxiety , others say the low sides of diabetes, what do you think?

Answer 1

many things can cause hypoglycemia, which is defined as low blood sugar. simply eating a diet high in carbs or being nervous will not cause it. diabetes is definitely the most common reason, but it can be caused by pituitary problems, severe infections, simply not eating, and other reasons.

Answer 2

Many people often feel they are hypoglycemic after exercise, working etc, it is rare for a person who is not on diabetic medications to actually become hypoglycemic. Majority of hypoglycemic episodes are secondary to insulin administration that is too high, using medications called sulfonureas (glybride etc). Rarely there are tumors that secrete something similiar to insulin. Eating lots of carbs, or anxiety itself will not cause hypoglycemia, there is no such thing as low side of Diabetis but as explained above, surplus of the medications. Hope this helps.

Answer 3

It is when your sugar level drops below 85 hypoglycemia can set in. It is very dangerous. You can go into a diabetic coma. This is not a matter of what I think. This is a matter of what I know as a healthcare professional.

Answer 4

We are beginning to understand that most, if not all, of those cases of hypoglycemia for which the cause has been listed "unknown" can be explained by the North American Diet. The past 100 years has seen us go from whole grains to over-processed white bread, and from water to soda pop. That has to have an effect on our overall health, and this chapter will explain how our over-processed and over-refined diet has been the primary cause of hypoglycemia, insulin resistance and the mysteriously named "Syndrome X". Insulin resistance and Syndrome X have been implicated in high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes.

Insulin Resistance and Syndrome X have both been "discovered" in the past 15-20 years and they turn out to be part of the chain of events leading from hypoglycemia to diabetes, heart disease and even cancer.

Reactive Hypoglycemia: The Diet Connection

"Today's family is always on the go and shopping and cooking take second place to making a living and spending quality time with loved ones. "

Sounds like an ad for convenience food, doesn't it? Does "quality food" have to take second place to "quality time"? Do we have to use pre-packaged foods to meet our schedule? What are we eating?!

Read the ingredients on your favourite packaged foods. I find it disturbing that I can't even pronounce the names of all the ingredients I have seen on many "food" packages. Our bodies are not meant to run on this stuff.

We hear a lot lately about the "cave man" or "Palaeolithic" diets. We presume that cave men were not farmers, and that they ate meat and vegetables, and little or no grain. We are part of this evolutionary family tree, and grains are a relatively new part of our diet.

I'm not advocating cutting grains out of our diets, but if grains are a relatively new fuel for humans, perhaps they should be used in moderation. Our digestive systems are well-suited to raw vegetables as well. Lots of roughage, and we know that the whole system works better that way. In fact, studies have shown that people eating a high-fibre diet are less likely to slide down into Type II diabetes.

So why are we consuming mostly bleached, smooth white flour (almost always wheat, but more on that subject later) and refined sugar? What is this doing to our systems? I believe that the massive change in our diets over the past 100 years is the primary cause of the high incidence of heart disease, cancer and diabetes in the developed world.

Native populations of North America switched to a high grain diet much more recently than peoples of Europe did. The highest incidence of diabetes is in the indigenous populations of North America. Is it just coincidence that the native peoples of North America may be some hundreds of years behind in adapting to a diet comprised mostly of refined grains? The incidence of diabetes is also much higher in people of Hispanic, African, and Asian descent. Again, these are all groups that switched to a highly refined diet relatively recently.

In his 1975 book, The Saccharine Disease, T. L. CLEAVE, M.R.C.P., a retired surgeon with the British Royal Navy states that "twenty years after refined carbohydrates are adopted [into a culture] there is dramatic rise in dental caries, obesity, diabetes and heart disease, as well as in the diseases associated with low fiber intake including diverticulitis, varicose veins and hemorrhoids."

The addition of refined sugar is another major change in our diets in the past 100 years. Just after the beginning of the 21st century, the average North American eats over 100 pounds of sugar per year! That's a conservative estimate-some sources suggest that the real number is 160 pounds!

We have been taught that sugar's only adverse effect is on our teeth, and the solution to that is easy-brush your teeth. Other than that, sweets have more calories, so we just need to "cut down" if we need to lose weight. I used to think that, since we "run" on sugar, eating sugar just meant that my body didn't have to work for the calories that I got from my sugar. The truth is that sugar, in its conversion to glucose and glycogen, uses the resources of our bodies. The refinement process has removed all of the sugar cane's natural nutrients, so digestion of sugar uses those already stored in your body. Chromium, zinc, vitamin C, magnesium, calcium and B vitamins are all needed to digest sugar, and these have to be found in your body. This means that eating a lot of sugar can actually result in vitamin and mineral deficiencies.

Dr. Ahron Cohen showed that "rats secreted more insulin to control their blood sugar after 3 weeks of a diet containing 67% sugar, after 6 weeks at 40% sugar and 13 weeks at 33% sugar. The rats regained normal glucose tolerance after some time on a normal diet, but permanent damage was done because it took only days for impaired glucose tolerance to develop when sugar was given once more. In people, this effect causes the blood sugar to fall too low, leading to "reactive hypoglycemia".

What we eat has a direct impact on our health.

This is obvious, but we don't think about it much. Most of us even think we eat fairly healthy foods most of the time. We all learn about the Canada Food Guide or the recommendations of the American Surgeon General, but we only think about it when the doctor warns us to eat more calcium because we are beginning to show signs of osteoporosis, or more spinach because we are anemic.

According to Dr. Ron Rosedale of the International Center for Metabolic Medicine in Boulder, Colorado, the North American diet is the root cause of most of the 21st century's most frightening diseases, including heart disease, diabetes and even cancer. He has documented improvements in many of his seriously ill patients after changing their diets. Diabetics reduce their insulin, heart patients are able to avoid surgery, and patients with high blood pressure and high cholesterol are able to drastically reduce, or even stop, their medications.

Insulin resistance and Syndrome X are the epidemic of our century. As I research for this book, I am starting to see more and more information and articles about insulin resistance. It is encouraging to see that these problems are starting to gain recognition beyond the medical community, but it is disturbing to see that the diet link is still in the background. Just today, I read an "infomercial" about insulin resistance in a weekly newsmagazine I subscribe to. Seeing "Insulin Resistance" in a popular magazine really got my attention, but I was disappointed to note that the "article" was paid for by GlaxoSmithKline as an ad for their diabetes drugs.

What we eat has a direct impact on our health.

I am repeating myself, but we need to really understand what this means. It means that if we eat healthy foods, reduce sugar and refined grains and add more variety including more raw and unprocessed foods, not only will we feel well and energetic, we will prevent disease and live longer.

Insulin Resistance

Most cases of reactive hypoglycemia are labelled idiopathic, which means "unknown cause". I believe insulin resistance causes most cases of idiopathic reactive hypoglycemia, and that insulin resistance is caused, in turn, by diet and heredity. Insulin resistance can be an early warning sign of Type II diabetes and studies have shown that some type II diabetics have been insulin resistant for up to 12 years before diagnosis.

Insulin is supposed to trigger the acceptance of stored sugar into the body's cells, but over time and with an over-refined diet, our cells can become insulin resistant. When cells are insulin resistant, it takes more and more insulin to trigger the acceptance of additional sugar into cells in your body.

Unchecked, this often progresses to Type II diabetes because our pancreas just gives up after years of producing more insulin than it was meant to. Our blood pressure and cholesterol and tryglycerides readings go up, and now we are at risk of heart attack. PROCAM (Prospective Cardiovascular Munster) Study: Diabetes or high blood pressure increases the risk of heart attack by 2.5 times; Both diabetes and high blood pressure increases risk by 8 times; Abnormal lipid profile increases risk 16 times; abnormal lipids plus diabetes and/or diabetes increases the risk of heart attack 20 times. Syndrome X is defined as insulin resistance with high blood pressure and high tryglycerides. Syndrome X also increases the risk of developing cancer.

As with almost everything, some people are more quickly affected by adverse conditions than others are. We already know that some people are more likely to get diabetes or cancer or heart disease. And this is at least partly because some people are more likely to have trouble with our over-processed and over-refined diet than others are. This is the heredity component of insulin resistance. The more refined foods, especially sugar, that we eat, the more insulin the pancreas produces. No one should be eating the amounts of sugar that most of us do, but some people's bodies can resist the effects longer.

Insulin resistance happens when your body has been overwhelmed with too much insulin for so long that your cells stop listening. For the cells of your body, a constantly high level of insulin is just like constant noise in your ears. Over time, you learn to ignore the noise, and it takes a louder sound to get your attention. Your cells view insulin in the same way. It takes more and more insulin to get your cells to pay attention. When your cells ignore insulin and refuse to open to take in sugar from your blood, your pancreas simply sends more insulin until your cells begin to respond. The excess insulin has several effects. First, by the time the cells finally begin to accept sugar, there is so much insulin floating around that your blood sugar drops too much-hypoglycemia. Second, insulin resistance causes more insulin resistance, so eventually there is a lot of insulin floating around your system all the time.

All that insulin makes it really difficult to keep your blood sugar steady. When the insulin resistance train has been accelerating on its track for a while, your body really isn't handling sugar properly anymore, and you will end up with an "abnormal sugar metabolism". One way an abnormal sugar metabolism will show up is in chronic hypoglycemia.

Processing sugar is hard work. Eating a donut or a cookie or a granola bar causes a blood sugar spike that the pancreas must deal with. Every spike requires the release of insulin to get it back under control. If we eat a lot of refined foods containing a lot of sugar, we start to live on the blood sugar roller coaster and we have a lot of insulin in our bodies most of the time. Abnormal sugar handling, over time, causes increased insulin resistance.

We know that a high level of sugar in the blood is bad. That's why diabetics stop eating sweets and take medication. A high level of insulin is also bad, but more insidious.

Insulin is not meant to sit around in the body all the time, and excess insulin causes a host of problems. For one thing, insulin is a storage hormone, so if you have too much insulin floating around, you will gain weight because excess sugar is stored as fat. Excess weight is a major risk factor for diabetes, and so is overworking the pancreas by producing too much insulin.

In early Type II diabetes, the pancreas is working very hard to keep up with the demand. Insulin levels in the body are abnormally high, and your blood sugar may be alternating between high and low. This leads to full-blown diabetes when the over-worked pancreas simply can't produce the amounts of insulin needed to overcome the insulin resistance of the body's cells. This slide into Type II diabetes is much more likely in people who are significantly overweight. 65% of people living with diabetes will die of a heart attack or stroke.

In addition to Type II diabetes, insulin resistance can cause an increase in blood pressure, "bad" cholesterol and tryglycerides. Dr. Gerald Reaven first recognized that these problems are linked in the late 1980s. He coined the term Syndrome X because no one knew at the time how these problems were linked or what caused them. But it's as clear now as it was then- this combination is a heart attack waiting to happen!