Updates to Blood Sugar 101

Page Changed: Research Connecting Blood Sugar Level to Organ Damage
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NOTE: It is important to keep in mind that the readings people get on glucose tolerance tests may be lower at two hours after consuming the glucose than the readings they get while eating meals containing carbohydrates that require digestion. The speedy absorption of the glucose that occurs during a glucose tolerance test often causes reactive hypoglycemia in people with prediabetes, giving them what look like normal numbers. But in daily life they may be experiencing blood sugars well above normal for an hour or two after slower-digesting meals. Unless you live on a diet of pure glucose, this is an important finding. Because it is the number of hours your nerves spend exposed to high blood sugars that appears to damage them.

Sadly, there are no studies where subjects with neuropathy were given meal tests rather than the highly artificial oral glucose tolerance test. However, anecdotal reports from people with neuropathy who have lowered their post meal blood sugars suggest that keeping blood sugars under 140 mg/dl (7.8 mmol/L) at one hour after eating meals can slowly reverse neuropathy.

Unfortunately, since most doctors are not aware that it is possible reverse neuropathy by lowering blood sugars to normal levels or believe it is impossible for people with diabetes to lower their blood sugars to normal levels at all, few doctors suggest that patients with neuropathy treat it by striving to achieve normal blood sugars. Instead, they prescribe the very dangerous brain drugs, gabapenin (Neurontin) and pregabalin (Lyrica) which may relieve neurological pain to some extent but don't in any way heal damaged nerves. These drugs can have devastating side effects, so before you try one, try lowering your blood sugars to normal levels for a few months. You can learn how to do that HERE

Further down, added:

The reason slightly elevated fasting blood sugars correlate with beta cell dysfunction and/or destruction is almost certainly that people with slightly elevated fasting blood sugars who eat high carbohydrate meals are experiencing high, and often long lasting, blood sugar spikes after each meal they eat.  ...  It is almost certainly those high post meal readings that go along with elevated fasting levels that cause the glucose toxicity that damages organs and causes complications, not the slightly higher than normal fasting blood sugars.This conclusion is backed up by the experience of those of us with diabetes who have kept our post-meal blood sugars under 140 mg/dl after meals for a decade or more. We generally find that our diabetes does not progress and that we do not develop the classic diabetic complications.

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