What if instead of taking Actos (pioglitazone) or Avandia (rosiglitazone) or Glucophage (metformin), the medication you really needed for blood sugar control in diabetes were vitamin c? A study coming from Iran suggests that for some diabetics, vitamin C might be as useful as many common medications.

Researchers at the Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences & Health Services followed 84 diabetics given either 500 mg or 1,000 mg of supplemental vitamin C every day for six weeks.

Taking 500 mg of vitamin c every day did not result in any measurable benefits. Diabetics taking 1,000 mg of vitamin C a day, however, had lower fasting blood glucose, lower triglycerides, lower LDL cholesterol, and lower HbA1C in just 42 days.

How much lower?

Average fasting blood glucose levels fell from 169.33 mg/dl to 144.80 mg/dl.

Average HbA1C fell from 8.82 per cent to 7.66 per cent. (This is better than most medications.)

Average LDL cholesterol fell from 130.95 mg/dl to 125.91 mg/dl.

And the drop in insulin levels was astonishing, from 16.91 microunits per ml to 8.77 microunits per ml.

When there is less insulin, there is less fat storage. vitamin c should help diabetics keep from gaining weight.

These results suggest that many diabetics may benefit from vitamin c, but the results should be interpreted with some reservations. If you are already on one or several medications, the additional benefits of taking a 1,000 mg vitamin c tablet every day, at least in terms of your blood sugars, triglycerides, and HbA1c, may be limited. Also, vitamin in your blood interacts with the enzymes in blood glucose test strips so that the glucometer reading is low, while the actual blood sugar is higher.

It’s also possible that using vitamin C for several months can, like using R-lipoic or alpha-lipoic acid, give you a reduction in HbA1C that doesn’t really result from improved blood sugars. Doctors test HbA1C to get a rough estimate of how high or low blood sugars have run over several months. Strong antioxidants keep glucose from “sticking” to hemoglobin, so less HbA1C is formed at the same blood sugar level.

The effects of vitamin c on blood sugar measurements of various kinds may not be major, but they do tend to exaggerate the vitamin’s benefits. Where vitamin c might really help you is to keep you from gaining weight.

Just get your C from an extended-release formula, and make sure you don’t take more than 1,000 mg a day. You may, according to some other studies, get some benefits from just 250 mg a day.

Vitamin C is also important for diabetics’ cardiovascular health.

That’s because the amount of vitamin c a diabetic gets may also measure risk of stroke. Among the 20,649 participants in the Norfolk Prospective Population Study in the UK, those whose bloodstream concentrations of vitamin c ranked in the top 25 per cent were 42 per cent less likely to have a stroke than those in the bottom 25 per cent.

This finding does not prove that diabetics can prevent strokes by taking vitamin c, or even confirm with certainty that diabetics can reduce their risk of stroke by taking vitamin C. It is possible that there’s some other element of a healthy lifestyle that goes along with getting enough vitamin c that’s really protective. This study does show, however, that getting adequate vitamin C certainly does not hurt diabetics’ cardiovascular health.

Receiving a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes is definitely a shock to your system… but hearing all those medical terms health professionals use is another! There are some pretty big medical terms used and you often wonder what they mean and why they are important. Better blood sugar control over time means less chance of complications to people who have either type 1 or type 2 diabetes. This is why your glycosylated hemoglobin level, one of those great medical terms, is really important to you.

The glycosylated hemoglobin test:

is also known as the HbA1c, A1c, or maybe your percentage was shown to be beneficial to diabetics because it gives you and your health care practitioner a true picture of your average blood sugar level over the last ninety days gives you the best understanding of how you are controlling your type 1 or type 2 diabetes
To understand how this test works:

Normal red blood cells live for ninety days. As the red blood cell travels through your bloodstream, it shares that space with other molecules and chemicals… one of them is blood sugar. Sugar in your blood has the potential of combining or sticking to the hemoglobin in your red blood cells. This process is called glycation, in other words, sugar binds with your cell’s hemoglobin. When this happens, your hemoglobin is essentially damaged because it cannot go back to its normal configuration once it is glycated. Instead, its protein structure is twisted and nonfunctional.

The higher your blood sugar levels, the more sugar will be found sticking to your hemoglobin. The hemoglobin that is bound to the sugar molecule is called hemoglobin A1c. The higher the value of hemoglobin A1c on your laboratory test, the higher the amount of glycation that has occurred in your body. Levels for diabetics should be less than 6.0%… this means that 6% of the hemoglobin tested has sugar bound to it.

The problem with high glycation levels is the sugar damage does not just stop there; it continues. Excess sugar in your bloodstream binds:

with proteins in your brain and can contribute to dementia to proteins in the lens of your eye, the glycation damage can cause blindness with the proteins in your skin, the result is you look ten years older to proteins in your kidneys; the reaction can cause the diabetic complication called nephropathy
What is the normal range?

If your HbA1c level is less than 6%, then your treatment is working. If it’s at 14% and was 12% three months prior, then your treatment needs to be changed. The official levels that are used by the American Diabetes Association are 7.0%, not 6.0.% The International Diabetes Federation and American College of Endocrinology recommend HbA1c levels are kept below 6.5%. The normal range of an HbA1c level is between 4.0% and 5.9%.

While the HbA1c provides great information, it is not a replacement for daily monitoring of your blood sugar levels.

Yes, it can and here is how.

The most frequent cognitive deficits in persons with diabetes are:

o Slowing of information processing speed

o Slowing of motor speed

o Decreases in vocabulary and intelligence

o Lessening of attention span

o Decreases in motor strength

o Loss of memory

The single most important factor is glycemic or sugar control. Both too low (hypoglycemia) and too high (hyperglycemia) blood glucose can affect cognitive function. All of these above items improve with better glucose control.

Complications such as neuropathy (loss of feeling), retinopathy (loss of eye sight), and nephropathy (loss of kidney function) may take years to occur with diabetes. Cognitive deficits can occur much earlier (especially when your hemoglobin A1C is higher than 8.4%).

In elderly diabetic persons, this is especially true, with more than 10% showing at least some cognitive deficit due at least in part to poor blood sugar control.

Okay, so what can you do to keep your brain sharp? In other words, how do you keep all your marbles?
You keep your blood glucose levels as close to normal as possible. In keeping a tight control over your blood glucose you will sharpen your brain and prevent any further deterioration.

There are three main ways of doing this.

o The first is to control your diet by counting your carbohydrates. Your health care professional can tell you how many carbohydrates that you should eat.

o The second method is to exercise. Exercise has been proven over and over again to lower blood glucose (and it makes you feel better). Exercise can lower your blood glucose for hours to days (after your exercise is complete). Make sure to check your blood glucose both before and after you exercise. You want it to remain within a normal level. Your health care provider can tell you what normal levels are for you. Never start an exercise routine without checking with your health care provider.

o The third method is medications. Not all diabetics take medications but if you do, make sure you take them properly.

The bottom line for successful control of blood sugars is predictability. It is impossible to use insulin or medications unless you can predict the effects they will have. Nor can you normalize blood sugars unless you can predict the effects of the foods you eat.

Until you become an expert in predicting your blood sugars, following one rule will save you the ill effects of low blood sugars and high blood sugars alike:

Small inputs lead to no more than small errors.

Since 2004, the American Diabetes Association (ADA) has recommended a minimum of 130 grams of carbohydrate per day for diabetics, with 65 per cent of calories as a maximum. For extremely active diabetics, then, the ADA recommends up to 400 grams of carbohydrate per day.

What neither the ADA nor the side of the box will tell you is that food manufacturers are permitted an error of plus or minus 20 per cent in their labeled ingredients. So even if you eat exactly what your diet requires, exercise exactly the number of minutes your doctor recommends, and take insulin and other medications precisely on schedule, your blood sugars can run seriously high or seriously low on the ADA diet.

How much of a problem can variation in ingredients be? Let’s say you ate a large plate of pasta labeled to contain 150 grams of carbohydrate, the maximum the ADA recommends for each meal. Variation in manufacturing practices means the actual carbohydrate content of your meal could be anywhere from 120 grams (20 per cent low) to 180 grams (20 per cent) high. If you are a muscular type 1 diabetic who weighs 180 pounds (80 kilos), 1 gram of carbohydrate will raise your blood sugars about 3 mg/dl. Even if you are doing everything else right to keep your blood sugars at 90 mg/dl, your actual blood sugars may range anywhere from 180 mg/dl to 0 mg/dl. At 180 mg/dl, your cells protect themselves from autooxidation of glucose, which is essentially glucose burning the in the bloodstream before it ever reaches its destination. To deal with the surge of free radicals, cells make sure they do not absorb toxic levels of glucose by becoming insulin-resistant. This means that whatever you are doing right before won’t work quite as well the next time you do it. At 0 mg/dl, of course, life ends, although chances that long before you became unconscious you would experience hunger. Your appetite leads you to make up the missing carbs and then some, causing your blood sugars, and your energy levels, to swing up and down. It is not unusual for diabetics’ blood glucose levels to vary between 40 mg/dl (dangerously low) and 400 mg/dl (dangerously high) throughout the day every day, but averaging nearly normal. The HbA1C readings your doctor takes every three months may not show much is out of balance. Extremely high blood sugars after every meal, however, make your cells insulin-resistant, whether or not you are insulin-dependent.

“Natural” foods, especially fruits, can have even greater variation in carbohydrate content. A 3-1/2 ounce (100 gram) apple is generally counted as containing 12 grams of carbohydrate. Different varieties of fresh apples, however, may have anywhere from 11 to 16 grams of carbohydrate (Hecke and collaborators, 2006). Apples picked during a drought year, however, may contain as much as 40 grams of carbohydrate per 100-gram serving, more carbohydrate than in apple pie!

Variation in the carbohydrate content of foods is not the only consideration. Your stomach empties your meal so it can provide carbohydrate more quickly the more thoroughly you chew – or if you chew gum after eating. Your stomach empties your meal more slowly if you consume foods with lots of fiber or if you eat foods prepared with cinnamon. Either way, the more carbohydrate you eat, the more likely your body’s own or injected insulin is not going to be up to the job.

Most insulin-dependent, type 1 diabetics know that it is possible to “cover” a bowl of pasta or a piece of pie by taking an unusually large injection of insulin. Blood sugars soar for a few hours, but insulin eventually is able to bring them down. In many type 2 diabetics, the body “covers” unusually high carbohydrate loads without the diabetic ever knowing it.

The problem in both cases is that for a period of several hours to a day the body suffers the ill effects of high blood sugars. The nerves, the eyes, the heart, and the kidneys are all susceptible to the ravages of glycosylated hemoglobin even if hyperglycemia is temporary. Cells throughout the body become resistant to insulin to prevent the flood of free radicals associated with extremely high blood sugars after high-carb meals.

The good news is, if you consume only small amounts of carbohydrate at each meal, you can easily prevent both high and low blood sugars. All diabetics can prevent soaring blood sugars after meals by taking fast-acting insulin before meals. Many type 2 diabetics are able to prevent high blood sugars through their own phase-1 response, as long as the carbohydrate is slow-acting and portions are small.