Episode 42: Q&A Weekends: Why Does it Matter if I keep My Blood Sugar Down After I Eat?
Posted on February 20, 2016
A little bit of background about this question, Travis did not email this question in, I actually met Travis in person, he’s my friend’s brother. Last weekend we went skating together as a group on the Canal and we were talking about exercising and he was asking me questions about the podcast and was actually quite interested in it. It was gratifying for me to be talking to someone that I hardly knew that was interested in their own health enough that they would ask questions about the podcast so Travis thank you for that, it’s why we’re doing this.
Travis’ question came about like this, half way through the skate we stopped at the Beaver Tail Hut and had Beaver Tails, which is basically mandatory if you go skating on the canal. If you’ve never been to Ottawa I highly recommend you have a beaver tail, it’s a giant deep-fried donut that’s flat like a beaver tail with incredible tasty things like sugar and cinnamon or chocolate and maple fudge on top of it. After we had ours I casually said ‘it’s a good job we’re skating right now because that will at least keep our blood sugar a little bit lower.’ and Travis just asked me why does that matter if we keep our blood sugar levels down?’ It’s a great question, it matters for a couple of reasons, in order to understand why it’s important for us to keep our blood sugar levels down it’s important for you to understand how sugar works in your body.
Your body uses sugar as energy, sugar is consumed in the form of simple sugar or carbohydrates in your regular diet from sources like breads, vegetables, rice, potatoes, as well as unhealthier things like gummies, chocolate and yes Beaver Tails. Your body breaks that food down into its smallest component of sugar and then that sugar gets transported in your blood. Then from your blood it gets transported into the cells of your body, where one of 3 things happens, it either gets used as energy right away, it get’s stored in your muscles cells for future use as glycogen or it gets stored throughout the rest of your body as fat. What happens is your body needs a limited amount of sugar to actually do all of its functions, so when you eat too much sugar at once your blood sugar goes very high very quickly so your body releases a bunch of insulin to carry the sugar into the cells to be used, but when the cell gets too full of energy, it tells the insulin ‘we’re full, so the insulin goes to store it as glycogen, which means it’s not in the cell for use but stored in the muscle ready to go. But once your glycogen stores are full then it gets stored as fat in your body. What happens when you exercise is instead of all the sugar going directly into the cells for storage it gets used up right away. Because your body says ‘I’m moving so I need sugar right now and it’s already available in my blood’ so it uses the sugar that you just consumed right away. So your body doesn’t have to produce as much insulin to bring your blood sugar down. This is good for a couple of reasons, one, it means that the sugar you just consumed is used as energy right away, so it completely skips the storage stage in your body which means it has no chance of becoming fat and your body produces less insulin, so your cells sensitivity to insulin stays high meaning your body needs to produce less insulin in the future to keep your blood sugar levels normal, which means you significantly decrease your chances of getting Type 2 diabetes. Type 2 Diabetes is a very dangerous disease. To start, once you become diabetic your chance of having a heart attack becomes higher than if you’ve already had a heart attack, it’s also very hard on your kidneys because they try to clean the access sugar out of your blood and the last thing I’m going to talk about here is your circulation becomes impaired this means blood has trouble traveling to your arms and legs which can cause numbness and tingling or worse the tissue can become infected and start to die which means you could potentially need to get your foot amputated. So that’s why keeping your blood sugar really low is important, so you can keep your feet attached to your body.
Now we were skating as a way to be active, but a more practical way to keep your blood sugar down is to just go for a walk, Dr. James Levine from the Mayo Institute and inventor of the treadmill desk. Showed in his research that speeds as low as 1.2 mph can keep your blood sugar levels from spiking, which is a very slow walking pace. So Travis I hope you found this answer helpful, every time you eat something if you can get up and move around, even 15 minutes is enough to keep your blood sugar levels lower and decrease the amount of insulin released. That’s why getting up and going for a little walk after you eat dinner is one of the healthiest activities you can do, especially if you don’t do anything else for the rest of your day at least go for a short walk after dinner, your heart, feet and kidneys will thank you.
