High Blood Sugar – A Sticky Situation

Author: Richard Laliberte
Excerpt from: Stopping Diabetes In Its Tracks, The Reader’s Digest Association

Think about what happens when you spill honey; it gets on your fingers, sticks to everything you touch, and generally gums up your entire kitchen counter. Now imagine a honey spill taking place inside your bloodstream – which is essentially what high blood sugar is. What happens? Cells, proteins, and fats get stickier, slowing circulation, holding back tissue repair, and encouraging material to adhere to your artery walls and cause clots. In short, excess blood sugar gums up your entire body.

You don’t leave honey on your countertop. Likewise, you should clean up blood sugar as quickly and thoroughly as possible because the “stickiness” only gets worse. Doing so can make you feel better right off the bat. And even if you have no symptoms of diabetes, taking this action will start to reduce your risk of such problems as these:

• Damage to delicate blood vessels at the back of the eye (the retina), which can lead to vision problems
• Ruined capillaries in the kidneys that filter waste from your body via the bloodstream
• Impaired nerve function due to less nourishment from damaged blood vessels
• Damage to artery walls that makes them more likely to snag blood clots and plaque that can cause heart attack stroke, and high blood pressure

The silver lining in this cloud of gloom and doom is the fact that few serious diseases allow you to fight back as much as diabetes does. If you take the right steps to keep the condition under your control, you can live a full and active life. In fact, some people who successfully turn their diabetes around say that because of positive action they took, such as exercise and proper diet, they now feel healthier overall than they have in years.