Are you wondering why your blood sugar level was high on your last blood test? Have you been playing around with a continuous glucose monitor and don't understand why your glucose spikes above the normal range? This guide will explain what high blood sugar is, its causes, the risks, and how to lower it. Let's dive in!
What is a High Blood Sugar Level?
High blood sugar, also known as hyperglycemia, happens when there is too much sugar (also called “glucose”) in your blood. Here’s a simple breakdown:
Types of High Blood Sugar
Fasting Hyperglycemia: This occurs when your blood sugar level is higher than 130 mg/dL (7.2 mmol/L) after not eating or drinking for at least 8 hours. If your fasting blood glucose is between 100 mg/dL (5.6 mmol/L) and 126 mg/dL (7 mmol/L), it’s called prediabetes. If it’s above 126 mg/dL, that’s called type 2 diabetes.
Postprandial (After-Meal) Hyperglycemia: This is when your blood sugar level is over 180 mg/dL (10.0 mmol/L) two hours after eating. For most people without diabetes, blood sugar levels are usually below 140 mg/dL (7.8 mmol/L) after a meal, unless the meal is very high in carbs and sugars. Postprandial hyperglycemia can also be called a glucose spike, which is defined as an increase in blood sugar of at least 30 mg/dL (1.7 mmol/L) after eating. Managing glucose spikes is essential for overall health, and for reducing fasting blood sugar levels over time.
Normal Blood Sugar Levels
Before a meal: 75 to 100 mg/dL (4.2 to 5.6 mmol/L).
Two hours after the start of a meal: Less than 180 mg/dL (10.0 mmol/L) and the spike shouldn't be more than 30 mg/dL (1.7 mmol/L).
Understanding these numbers helps you know when your blood sugar is too high.
What Causes High Blood Sugar?
High blood sugar can be caused by several factors. Let’s break them down:
Diet
Eating many processed foods, sweet drinks, and foods high in starches or sugars can raise blood sugar levels.
To make managing your blood sugar easier, I've created a classification system that categorizes foods based on their glucose content and how they impact blood sugar levels. This system helps you understand which foods might cause blood sugar spikes, allowing you to make informed choices to keep your glucose levels under control.
Mostly Starch: These foods contain significant amounts of starch and can cause blood sugar spikes. Examples include bread, pasta, rice, and potatoes.
Mostly Sugar: Like starch, these foods are high in glucose and can lead to quick spikes. This category includes items like candy, sweetened yogurts, and fruit juices.
Mostly Fiber: Foods in this category help stabilize blood sugar levels. They include vegetables like broccoli, spinach, and kale.
Mostly Protein and Mostly Fat: These categories include foods that have minimal impact on glucose levels, helping keep your blood sugar steady. Examples are nuts, seeds, fish, and oils like olive oil.
Understanding where foods fit within these categories not only aids in managing immediate responses to meals but also supports long-term metabolic health and energy balance.
Insulin Resistance
Insulin resistance happens when your body’s cells don’t respond well to insulin. Insulin is a hormone that helps sugar get into your cells to be used for energy. When cells can’t respond to insulin properly, sugar stays in your bloodstream, causing high blood sugar levels.
Physical Inactivity
Not being active can lead to high blood sugar because exercise helps your body use sugar for energy.
Medications
Some medications can cause your blood sugar levels to rise. Always check with your doctor if you notice changes in your blood sugar after starting a new medication.
Hormonal Conditions
Certain conditions like Cushing’s syndrome (too much cortisol) and acromegaly (too much growth hormone) can lead to high blood sugar.
Pregnancy
Some women develop high blood sugar during pregnancy, known as gestational diabetes.
Genetic Conditions
Certain inherited genetic conditions can also cause insulin resistance and high blood sugar:
Rabson-Mendenhall syndrome
Donohue syndrome
Myotonic dystrophy
Alström syndrome
Werner syndrome
Pancreatic Issues
Problems with the pancreas, such as autoimmune disease, chronic pancreatitis, pancreatic cancer, or cystic fibrosis, can cause high blood sugar.
Сonsequences of high blood sugar
High blood sugar, or hyperglycemia, has several serious consequences on our body. Let’s explore three of the most significant ones: mitochondrial stress, glycation, and insulin release.
Mitochondrial Stress
When we eat, glucose enters our cells and heads straight to our mitochondria, the tiny powerhouses that create energy. But when we have too much glucose at once, our mitochondria get overwhelmed. Imagine shoveling coal into a train's engine: if you throw in too much coal too fast, the engine can't handle it, and the train stops. Similarly, too much glucose produces harmful molecules called free radicals. These free radicals damage our DNA, poke holes in our cells, and cause oxidative stress, which is linked to heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and aging. The more glucose spikes we have, the more oxidative stress our body endures.
Glycation
Inside our bodies, glucose molecules can bump into other molecules and cause them to become "glycated." This process, known as the Maillard reaction, is similar to how toast browns. Once a molecule is glycated, it’s damaged forever. Glycation speeds up aging and is linked to wrinkles, cataracts, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s disease. Foods with fructose cause glycation ten times faster than foods with glucose. Glycation also contributes to inflammation, making our body more prone to chronic illnesses. The hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) test, used to measure glucose levels, actually measures glycation over the past two to three months.
Insulin Release
To manage excess glucose, our pancreas releases insulin, which helps store glucose in the liver and muscles as glycogen. However, when these storage units are full, insulin turns the excess glucose into fat. High insulin levels, necessary to manage frequent glucose spikes, lead to insulin resistance, weight gain, and conditions like type 2 diabetes and polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). Insulin also prevents our body from burning fat, making it difficult to lose weight. To reduce insulin levels and facilitate weight loss, it’s crucial to flatten our glucose curves. Lowering glucose spikes not only reduces fat storage but also decreases the risk of developing chronic inflammation-based diseases.
Risks of High Blood Sugar
Having too much sugar in your blood can lead to symptoms and diseases. Let’s look at each one:
Aging and arthritis
Depending on your diet, you may have spiked your glucose (and fructose) tens of thousands more times than your neighbour has by the time you reach 60. This will influence not just how old you look externally but how old you are internally. The more often we spike, the faster we age. Glycation, free radicals, and subsequent inflammation are responsible for the slow degradation of our cells—what we call ageing.
Free radicals also damage collagen, the protein found in many of our tissues, which causes sagging skin and wrinkles and can lead to inflammation in joints, rheumatoid arthritis, degradation of cartilage, and osteoarthritis: our bones get brittle, our joints are in pain, and we definitely can’t go for a run in the park. If there are too many free radicals and too much damage inside a cell, that cell can decide to undergo cell death to prevent further issues. But this isn’t without consequences.
When cells die, parts of us disappear: our bones waste away, our immune system weakens, our heart pumps less well, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s can develop. Flattening our glucose curves, along with exercising and reducing stress, is a potent way to prevent ageing.
Cancer risk
Children born today have a one in two chance of developing cancer in their lifetime. And poor diet, together with smoking, is the main driver in 50 percent of cancers. For starters, research documents that cancer may begin with DNA mutations produced by free radicals.
Second, inflammation promotes cancer’s proliferation. Finally, when there is more insulin present, cancer spreads even faster. Glucose is the key to many of these processes, and it shows in the data—people with fasting levels higher than 100 mg/dL, which is classified as prediabetes, have over double the likelihood of dying of cancer. Flattening glucose and insulin curves is thus an important step to helping prevent the development of cancer.
Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease
The medical community named this new condition nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) or nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). It’s extremely common: around the world, one out of every four adults has NAFLD. In people who are overweight, it’s even more common: over 70 percent of them have it.
Unfortunately, this condition can get worse over time, leading to liver failure or even cancer. To reverse the condition, the liver needs a break so that it depletes its excess fat reserves. The solution to this is to lower our fructose levels and prevent further fructose spikes—which happen naturally when we flatten our glucose curves (because fructose and glucose go hand in hand in food).
Depressive episodes
Your brain doesn’t have sensory nerves, so when something is wrong, it can’t alert you with pain as other organs do. Instead, you feel mental disturbances—such as a poor mood. When people eat a diet that leads to erratic glucose levels, they report worsening moods, more depressive symptoms, and more mood disturbances compared to those on a diet of similar composition but with steadier glucose levels. And the symptoms get worse as the spikes get more extreme, so any effort to flatten the curve, even moderately, could help you feel better.
Heart Health
When we talk about heart disease, cholesterol often steals the show. But it's not just about "too much cholesterol." Half of heart attack victims have normal cholesterol. The real troublemakers? A specific type of cholesterol (LDL pattern B) and inflammation, are both linked to glucose, fructose, and insulin.
Glucose and fructose spikes stress the cells lining our blood vessels, making them bumpy and more likely to trap fat. High insulin levels create LDL pattern B, a sticky cholesterol that clings to these rough patches. When this cholesterol oxidizes (thanks to more glucose, fructose, and insulin), it forms plaque that blocks blood flow.
Most doctors still focus on total LDL cholesterol and prescribe statins, but they miss the mark. Statins don't lower the problematic LDL pattern B. Instead, we should measure the triglycerides-to-HDL ratio and C-reactive protein levels to better predict heart disease.
Wrinkles and cataracts
Do you know why some 60-year-olds look as though they are 70, while others look as though they are 45? That’s because we can influence the speed at which we age—and one of those ways is by flattening our glucose curves. Glucose spikes result in glycation—and glycation makes us age faster and look older. For example, when glycation transforms a molecule of collagen, it makes it less flexible.
Collagen is needed to repair wounds, as well as make healthy skin, nails, and hair. Broken collagen leads to sagging skin and wrinkles. The more glycation, the more sagging skin and wrinkles. Crazy but true. Glycation happens everywhere in our body, including in our eyes; when it does, the molecules in our eyes experience damage and start to clump together. Over time, the accumulation of glycated proteins blocks the light and we develop cataracts.
Insulin Resistance and Type 2 Diabetes
Type 2 diabetes is a global epidemic, affecting half a billion people. It’s closely linked to high blood sugar levels. When insulin levels have been high for a long time, our cells start becoming resistant to insulin. Insulin resistance is the root cause of type 2 diabetes: liver, muscle, and fat cells need larger and larger quantities of insulin to take up the same amount of glucose. Eventually, the system doesn’t work anymore, and glucose levels stay high in the body.
As insulin resistance worsens, we progress to prediabetes (fasting glucose levels above 100 mg/dL or 5.6 mmol/L) and then to type 2 diabetes (above 126 mg/dL or 7.0 mmol/L). Each glucose spike over time worsens insulin resistance and raises baseline glucose levels.
In 2019, the American Diabetes Association endorsed glucose-flattening diets due to evidence showing their effectiveness in improving type 2 diabetes outcomes. To reverse type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance, we need to flatten our glucose curves. My hacks, which you’ll find right below, will show you how to do this while still enjoying your favorite foods.
Glucose Goddess Hacks to Lower Blood Sugar
Here are some simple hacks to help you manage and lower your blood sugar levels. Flattening your glucose curve on a daily basis will help you reduce your blood sugar levels in the long term.
Eat Foods in the Right Order
Start your meals with vegetables, then eat proteins and fats, and finish with starches and sugars. This order helps slow down the absorption of glucose, preventing blood sugar spikes.
Add a Veggie Starter
Begin your meals with a vegetable-based dish. The fiber in veggies helps reduce glucose spikes and keeps you fuller longer.
Have a Savoury Breakfast
Instead of sweet foods, start your day with a savoury breakfast packed with protein and healthy fats. Try eggs, avocado, or a delicious veggie omelette. This helps keep your blood sugar stable and prevents those morning glucose spikes, giving you steady energy throughout the day. By choosing a savoury breakfast, you're setting yourself up for success and balance, making it easier to stay energised and focused. Trust me, it's a game-changer!
Move your body after eating
A simple walk after eating can help your muscles use glucose more effectively, lowering your blood sugar levels. For example, you can aim for a 10-15 minute walk after each meal, some calf raises, or even a gym session. Up to you what you can easily fit into your daily routine.
Vinegar
Vinegar can be taken as 1 tablespoon in a tall glass of water (with a straw), or as a salad dressing, ideally up to 20 minutes before a meal. This reduces the spike of your meal by up to 30%.
These hacks are just the start! For a complete list of ways to manage your blood sugar effectively with everyday actions click the button down below 🔽
Other Ways to Lower High Blood Sugar
Here are some tips to help you lower your blood sugar levels:
Manage Stress
Practice relaxation techniques like deep breathing, meditation, and yoga to help reduce stress, which can affect blood sugar levels.
Get Enough Sleep
Aim for 7-9 hours of sleep each night to help your body manage blood sugar levels better.
LIST OF IMPORTANT SLEEP QUALITY FACTORS
Finding a routine and leaving time to unwind before bedtime,
Exposing yourself to morning light within 30 minutes after waking up,
Not looking at bright lights before sleep so melatonin can be secreted,
Sleeping in a cool room,
Sleeping in a blacked-out very dark room,
Not having dinner too close to bedtime,
Avoiding caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol before bedtime,
Relaxing the nervous system so you aren’t stressed as you go to bed.
Anti-Spike Formula can help manage blood sugar spikes and support overall metabolic health. It’s specially designed to help smooth out those troublesome blood sugar spikes.
Meet Anti-Spike Formula
Adding Anti-Spike Formula to your daily routine can provide additional support in managing high blood sugar levels. It contains powerful natural ingredients: white mulberry leaf, lemon extract, and cinnamon extract help stabilize blood sugar levels and improve overall metabolic health.
Benefits of Anti-Spike Formula
White Mulberry Leaf: Slows down the breakdown of sugars in the gut, so they are absorbed more slowly into the bloodstream.
Lemon Extract: Helps to modulate blood sugar levels, reduce inflammation, and enhance feelings of satiety.
Cinnamon Extract: Assists in managing insulin levels and improving insulin sensitivity, making it easier for your body to manage natural sugar intake.
Antioxidant-rich Vegetables: Supplies a concentrated dose of antioxidants that support overall cellular health and help manage the oxidative stress associated with blood sugar fluctuations .
How to Use Anti-Spike Formula
Daily Support: Add Anti-Spike to your daily regimen to give your body extra help in managing blood sugar levels effectively.
Long-Term Benefits: Regular use can lead to more stable blood sugar levels, helping to maintain healthy A1C levels and improving overall diabetes management.
Easy to Use: Whether taken with meals or as part of your morning routine, Anti-Spike is designed to fit seamlessly into your lifestyle.
Why Choose Anti-Spike?
Targeted Action: Each ingredient in Anti-Spike is selected for its specific benefits in controlling blood sugar, offering a targeted approach to managing blood sugar.
Comprehensive Support: Beyond just managing blood sugar, Anti-Spike supports overall metabolic health, contributing to better energy levels and general well-being.
Conclusion
To manage blood sugar effectively, have a look at what you eat every day, and try to add in the hacks when it’s easy; make sure to get regular exercise, anything from going for a walk after your meals to strength training a few times a week; managing stress by adding in some meditation to your daily routine; and try to get enough good quality sleep whenever you can. And you can also consider using Anti-Spike Formula for additional help to stabilise your blood sugar levels.