5 Top Benefits of Healthy Blood Sugar Levels

If you suffer from diabetes, you’ve probably been given all the warnings about how important it is to keep your blood sugar in check. But, maintaining healthy blood sugar levels is important for everyone, whether or not one has diabetes. Healthy blood sugar levels provide important overall health benefits you don’t want miss.

5 Top Benefits of Healthy Blood Sugar Levels

1. You Lower Your Risk of a Cardiovascular Event

No matter who you are, how healthy you are, or what diseases you do or don’t have, high blood sugar is stressful on the body. Studies have shown that a blood sugar level of 140 mg/dl after a meal increases your relative risk for heart attack by 30% to 60%, but the risk begins at even lower levels–even as low as 110 mg/dl. (http://www.cureality.com/blog/post/2010/04/02/rerun-to-let-low-carb-right-you-must-check-postprandial-blood-sugars.html)

About Relative Risk

Relative risk is in relation to your own standing risk, not a comparison with the entire population. So, if you’re 35, fit, have no diseases, and have just gotten a clean bill of health from your doctor, this means you’re 30% more likely to have a cardiovascular event after a blood-sugar spike than you were before the spike. Your likelihood of having such an event was already about 4%, so it has now gone up by 30%, which means your absolute risk is now 5.2%.

But let’s say you’re 47, have diabetes, and have poorly controlled blood pressure and high cholesterol. Your risk is more like 24%, and now your blood sugar goes up too high after a meal. Your 30% increase means your absolute risk is now 31.5%.

Protect Your Heart

The upshot of all this is that even at blood sugar levels far below what is normally considered diabetic, you still slightly increase your risk of a cardiovascular event when blood sugar spikes. And who among us, no matter how healthy, wants to increase their risk, even by a tiny margin?

2. You Strengthen Your Immune System

Your body has to use the glucose you put in it. When blood sugar levels go up, the body prioritizes taking care of this because high blood sugar–in anyone, not just diabetics–is a toxic situation the body must work to correct. That sugar either must be burned off as energy or stored safely away in the fat cells, and until the body does something with it, it de-prioritizes all other functions.

So what does this mean? If you eat a high-carb diet all the time at every meal, your body is spending an awful lot of time dealing with blood sugar. Glucose actually competes with vitamin C, which is one of the key vitamins that keep the immune system running nicely. Even at levels considered the high end of “normal” and not even close to diabetic, blood sugar is depressing the immune system. (http://www.diabetesincontrol.com/diabetes-mellitus-and-infectious-diseases-controlling-chronic-hyperglycemia/)

Protect Your Immune System

By keeping your blood sugar low, you’re giving your body the strength it needs to fight better against immediate infections. By keeping your blood sugar low long-term, you’re keeping it strong towards better long-term good health. Diet can help keep blood sugar low, and when it’s not possible to eat perfectly (and let’s face it, that’s often that’s the case), supplements like Glucose Control 7 ways help keep blood sugar in check.

3. You Lower Your Appetite

Whether you’re interested in losing weight or just want to be more intentional about what you’re putting in your body, lower blood sugar can help. One of the benefits of a low-carb diet is that, when followed for long enough, it leads to an automatic reduction in appetite. One of the biggest reasons for this is lower blood sugar. When blood sugar is high, our hunger spikes, and we just can’t seem to feel satisfied.

This makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective. Our ancient, pre-civilization ancestors didn’t get much food that could cause blood sugar to go up. When they did find a treasure trove of ripe fruit, they would use to pack on fat, which was incredibly useful for survival during cold winters. Our bodies are programmed to enjoy sugar and keep eating it until it’s all gone. (https://www.businessinsider.com/evolutionary-reason-we-love-sugar-2014-4?op=1)

Protect Your Diet

Whatever your reason for wanting to control what you eat, whether it’s to lose some weight, gain energy, or have more room for high-quality, healthy foods and less room for junk food, you’ll find it easier when blood sugar stays low. Glucose Control can be a huge help to your diet plan.

4. You Give Your Brain a Boost

The brain needs some glucose. Much of your brain can work with other fuel sources, but at least some of the energy has to come from glucose. That’s why your liver will turn protein into glucose if you don’t eat any. But your liver is good at doing this, and most of the brain actually functions best if you give it ketones to work with instead of sugar. Ketones are produced when the body is in its natural metabolic state, burning fat instead of sugar. That can only happen when blood sugar levels are at a healthy place.

How do we know this is good for the brain? Some key studies have shown that epileptic children who keep their blood sugar extremely low have far better results in terms of lowered seizures and less severe seizures than those who don’t, and even if they’ve never responded to antiepileptic drugs. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1474442208700929) Other studies have shown that high blood sugar caused much worse cognitive performance in those with Alzheimer’s, which keeping blood sugar extremely low improved the symptoms of Parkinson’s. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2367001/#R37)

Protect Your Brain

The health of your brain plays a big part in your long-term health. While there’s no diet or pill that can guarantee you’ll never get Alzheimer’s or cancer, and those of us without diseases like intractable epilepsy probably don’t need to keep our blood sugar at rock bottom, the evidence seems clear that keeping your blood sugar within healthy levels is good on many levels, including good for your brain.

5. Your Weight Loss Will Be Easier

There’s a reason that low-carb diets are all the rage: they really work. Once you get past the initial craving stage where you’re getting used to lower blood sugar, they’re more satisfying over the long-term than other diets, and they don’t leave you feeling grumpy and exhausted all the time. As mentioned above, lower blood sugar means less hunger, and less hunger makes it easier to stick with your diet plan, whatever it is. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022347602402065)

Keeping your blood sugar at healthy levels also means you’re less likely to experience cravings, which can be quite different from hunger. Hunger can be manageable. Cravings are more like a stimulus-response. Our stimulus-response activates faster than our conscious brain and is designed to keep us safe. When you step into the street, and a car is barreling down on you, your stimulus-response gets you instantly moving to run/dive/jump out of the way. You don’t have to stop and think about it or even make a conscious choice. You just do it.

The stimulus-response is all about survival, and when you’ve trained your brain to run on high blood sugar all the time, even a tiny drop throws it into a panic. “We’re about to starve!” it thinks, and you grab for the cookies, ice cream, or chips. You never grab a stick of butter.

Protect Yourself From Cravings

Cravings can kill a diet faster than anything. When we succumb to our cravings, we can also feel out of control, guilty, and angry with ourselves. By keeping blood sugar at normal, consistent, healthy levels, we give ourselves more strength to resist cravings and may even boost our mental health at the same time.

Get and Keep Healthy Blood Sugar Levels

There’s a lot that goes into healthy blood sugar, but you can give your body the boost it needs and start enjoying the benefits of healthy blood sugar levels with Glucose Control 7 Ways. Visit Panacea Scientific today and learn more about how to control your blood sugar and take charge of your health.