Mindfulness Blood Sugar Levels

What’s a Normal Blood Sugar?

I am often asked this question, “What is a normal blood sugar?” It should be relatively easy to answer, but there is a lot of potential confusion that I need to clarify.

What is the difference between sugar and glucose?

Sugar is the name for any one of many edible carbohydrates that taste sweet. The common one that you know is table sugar, which is actually sucrose, the sugar in sugar cane and sugar beets. Then there is the sugar in fruits, called fructose. But the sugar that really affects your life is glucose. This is the sugar that floats around in your blood, providing energy for your muscles, food for your brain cells and power for the millions of chemical reactions that take place in your body.

What is a normal blood glucose?

• You are extremely hungry
• You start to sweat
• Your heart beats fast
• You have numbness in your lips, fingers and toes

You can quickly reverse the low blood sugar by taking a little sugar, orange juice or honey.

What if your blood glucose is too high?

The treatment of diabetes is all about lowering the blood glucose so that it does not stay too high over ten or more years. If it remains too high for that long or longer you may get any or all of the following symptoms:

• Eye disease including blindness
• Kidney disease including kidney failure
• Nerve disease of many types
• Heart and blood vessel diseases including heart attacks, strokes poor blood flow to the legs

Usually, there are no symptoms of high blood glucose, so it is important to be screened with a blood glucose test at least once a year if you are 45 years of age or older.