Are you having hypoglycemia or reactive hypoglycemia? Maybe this is a new thing for you or you're just trying to figure it out. My name is Dr. Terranella. In this video, we're going to look at some approaches to take for resolving reactive hypoglycemia, including both obvious and not-so-obvious approaches.
Reference: www.ncbi.nlm.n...
So in this video, we're going to look at resolving reactive hypoglycemia. In previous videos, we laid out some of the symptoms and tests that might be helpful in identifying if you have reactive hypoglycemia or hypoglycemia in general. But I wanted to point out a few other things on this topic before going into the strategies on resolving it.
First, I think it's important to point out how the symptoms and the problems from hypoglycemia can linger in our bodies for far longer than the actual blood sugar episode itself. This is because there are compensatory responses that take place in our bodies in order to resolve the hypoglycemia or low blood sugar levels. And those swings from high to low can still be felt in our bodies hours later. You can think of it like dropping a stone into a still lake.
The larger the stone, the larger the waves, and it will start right when the stone drops in. And as the initial wave spreads out further and further, you notice it less and less, but the compensatory mechanisms may still be going on. So in this case, the stone is the meal or the glucose rise that initiates the waves.
The larger the glucose rise, the more imbalanced or symptomatic our bodies become. Of course, our blood sugar is going to rise after each meal, but the question is how much is it going to rise? How quickly and how long does it stay elevated? The goal, of course, is to have the least amount of rise for the least amount of time and the lowest slope of that rise.
So now the question is, what do you do? The most obvious thing to look at, from my perspective, is the amount of carbohydrates that you're eating in any given sitting. Some people are going to need more based on their activity level, and you can get a sense for how much more or less you need based on using a continuous glucose monitor. One thing is sure: if you are having reactive hypoglycemia or hypoglycemia, you're eating too many carbs.
Sometimes it's more so the type of carbohydrate that you're eating, more so than the total quantity as well. So there's something referred to as the glycemic index of foods, which measures and categorizes how quickly those carbohydrate sources raise your blood sugar. Taking a look at this and limiting the high glycemic index foods will go a long way to reducing these reactive hypoglycemic events or hypoglycemia in general.
These are important, but other less obvious things to consider include the depth and the amount of sleep that you're getting each night and your overall digestive health. As far as gut health is concerned, there is evidence that dysfunction in your microbiome makeup can alter metabolism, specifically glucose, through some complex mechanisms that we're still trying to understand.
This dysfunction, referred to as dysbiosis in the digestive tract, is what seems to be causing this. With dysbiosis, there are altered microbes in the digestive tract, meaning you have pathogenic ones or problematic microbes that shouldn't be there in the amount or abundance that they are.
And it can lead to alteration and metabolism of things like bile acids and other products that can affect the metabolism of glucose. One example of this is people with a post-infectious IBS can oftentimes get a decreased barrier function, which is the digestive tract barrier also known as leaky gut. People with that problem, leaky gut, are more likely to have metabolic dysfunction as well, higher triglycerides, higher glucose, insulin resistance, et cetera.
So this is a diagram from a study that is basically looking at this specifically and seeing this is the normal situation. And here we have increased penetration of problematic microbes or microbial proteins coming into the [digestive tract].
The immune system gets activated.
And we could see the interplay of GLP-1 here, which is basically a satiety hormone, and the immune cells getting activated by these problematic microbes can basically lead to problems in the overall regulation of these signals.
So that's just kind of a basic look at that, and you can certainly check out this study. I'll put a link in the description for this one as well. You can get a more detailed understanding of that, but this is something that is being researched right now. More details will be coming out soon on this topic.
So while it's not fully mapped out and understood, having higher levels of pathogenic microbes and not enough of the good ones definitely has some negative impacts on blood sugar and insulin levels.
14 дек 2023
