Turn down the volume with stable blood sugars

A client once told me that hav­ing dia­betes is like hav­ing an ampli­fier on a stereo. Any­thing that hap­pens to the body goes through the dia­betes ampli­fier and is made louder.

Just to make sure this gen­tle­man under­stood what he was telling me I asked him to explain what he meant by his state­ment. He went on to say that his body is like a radio that used to play music and he con­trolled the vol­ume with a sim­ple knob.

Now that he deals with dia­betes any thing that his body does is ampli­fied. If he has a cut or abra­sion, dia­betes turns up the vol­ume and a sim­ple scrape takes longer to heal. A cold or flu when plugged into the dia­betes ampli­fier is louder and more intense.

Pleased that the man was accept­ing and under­stand­ing the effects of this dis­ease we con­tin­ued to add to his exam­ples. Even nor­mal body func­tions are affected by the dia­betes amplifier.

His vision and hear­ing nat­u­rally are affected by the aging process; hered­ity and lifestyle pre­dict their func­tion­ing or loss of func­tion­ing. Dia­betes makes any slight defect worse. The small blood ves­sels in the eyes and ears are dam­aged by ele­vated blood sugars.

High blood glu­cose actu­ally makes blood thicker. Con­sider the dif­fer­ence between the thick­ness of a warm and a very cold milk shake. The higher the blood sugar the thicker the blood; the colder the milk shake the straighter the straw stands. When the blood or the milk­shake is thick, it is more dif­fi­cult to flow through blood ves­sels or the straw.

My client was mak­ing a lot of sense. Dia­betes ampli­fies even the blood run­ning through the body. The thicker the blood, the more dif­fi­cult it is to get to the tiny blood ves­sels of the eye and the ear and every­where else it needs to travel.

If the blood is full of sugar it doesn’t leave room for life sus­tain­ing oxy­gen to travel to those much needed places either. Dia­betes ampli­fies the process of oxy­genated blood get­ting to the brain, the kid­neys, the lungs, the heart, you name it.

The num­ber one rea­son why peo­ple with dia­betes die is heart dis­ease or stroke. One of the rea­sons that the blood pres­sure is ampli­fied with dia­betes is because it has to push heav­ier blood through­out the body.

The poor heart is work­ing over­time just to keep the body alive. Also, higher blood pres­sure increases the risk of debris from the inside of the blood ves­sels to dis­lodge and travel at a fast rate. When one of these par­ti­cles or clots gets caught in the brain, it blocks off the blood flow and a stroke occurs.

By this time in the con­ver­sa­tion the gen­tle­man was pump­ing his arms and speak­ing loudly. He was ampli­fy­ing his demon­stra­tion of dia­betes and his body.

I sim­ply asked him, “Now that you under­stand what is hap­pen­ing to your body, what are you going to do about it?” He qui­etly replied, “Turn down the vol­ume by keep­ing my blood sug­ars between 70 and 130 in the morn­ing.” I agreed.

Bob­bie Ran­dall is a cer­ti­fied dia­betes edu­ca­tor and a reg­is­tered, licensed dietit­ian. She super­vises a dia­betes self-management train­ing pro­gram at Aultman-Orrville Hos­pi­tal, Orrville. Con­tact her at bobbie.randall@aultmanorrville.org or 330–684-4776.

Posted by Bobbie Randall on Sep 5 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.