Low Blood Sugar: The Nutritional Plan to Overcome Hypoglycaemia, with 60 Recipes. Martin Budd, N.D., D.O.
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Название: Low Blood Sugar: The Nutritional Plan to Overcome Hypoglycaemia, with 60 Recipes
Автор: Martin Budd, N.D., D.O.
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Здоровье
isbn: 9780007483396
isbn:
For most of us this alarm-response by our body is in direct proportion to the intensity of the threat or stress. However, many who suffer with chronic low blood sugar lose their fine control and an adrenal hair-trigger response to stress of any kind leads to frequent and often unnecessary alarm-responses. When adrenaline is released on a regular basis for trivial reasons, many distressing symptoms can develop. Some sufferers, for instance, are frequently awakened at 3–4am bathed in sweat, anxious, with a rapid pulse and short of breath. This occurs because the adrenal response to their nocturnal low blood sugar is being inappropriately triggered and their metabolism is stressed.
Unfortunately, even when we sleep changes in the blood sugar can activate the adrenal response. Professor Hans Selye, who wrote the definitive first description of our response to stress in his landmark 1956 book The Stress of Life, described sleep as follows: ‘No one is ever absolutely at rest, while alive. Even during sleep, your heart, your respiratory muscles, your brain continue to work. It makes no difference that you are not conscious of this and that these activities require no voluntary effort on your part’.
Our management of stress is a very individual quality that depends on many factors. The amount and type of activity appropriate to a five-year-old child would be very stressful for a 75-year-old man and vice versa. Our stress load and our stress handling are unique to each of us. Stress can, of course, be on many levels, psychological, chemical, structural or environmental. It does not always need to be unpleasant or unexpected to give rise to symptoms. Enjoyable, planned events can also be stressful – excited children becoming sick at parties and sports people suffering asthma attacks are examples of this.
Trigger factors
The most common triggers that can cause low blood sugar symptoms include one or more of the following:
CHAPTER 4 The diagnosis of low blood sugar
I have diagnosed and treated patients with low blood sugar for 35 years, and over this time I have learnt that a simple diagnosis of ‘low blood sugar’ is rarely helpful for the patient and not always accurate. Indeed the diagnostic challenge with low blood sugar symptoms is to provide satisfactory answers to the following questions:
1 Are the symptoms of low blood sugar seen in a patient the result of poor stress handling or a faulty diet, and therefore transient and probably reversible? or
2 Are the symptoms the result of a chronic glandular imbalance, long-term stress, excessive reliance on caffeine, tobacco, alcohol and other drugs, or the many other factors associated with dysglycaemia?
In fact, many people with the symptoms of low blood sugar have several causes running parallel. As low blood sugar masquerades as so many different conditions, and can create such a diversity of symptoms, diagnosis can be difficult. For this reason, and others that will be discussed later, it is not wise to diagnose low blood sugar without professional help. Low blood sugar mimics very many serious diseases and it is therefore essential that the possibility of more serious causes for the symptoms is ruled out.
The clinical diagnosis of low blood sugar falls naturally into several stages.
Family history
Low blood sugar disorders can pass from generation to generation. It therefore follows that a detailed evaluation of a person’s family health is of considerable diagnostic value.
Table 1 – The family connection, 25 patients
Table 1 illustrates the family history of 25 patients with confirmed low blood sugar. These patients have been selected because they are typical low blood sugar cases. You will see that characteristic disorders pass through each family. The majority of patients with low blood sugar symptoms tend to show a previous history in their family of either asthma, migraine, hay fever, diabetes, obesity, chronic fatigue or depression.
Present symptoms
As we know, the symptoms of low blood sugar can be misleading to the diagnostician. Often of more significance than a list of symptoms are the pattern of cause and the time of onset of symptoms. One patient, Mr A, may experience headaches when reading or watching television, while another patient, Mr B, may develop headaches only in the early morning or when he drinks certain types of wine. In the case of Mr A, he may well have eyestrain, but Mr B could be suffering from low blood sugar.
Fatigue at the end of the day may be caused by overwork, anaemia or a variety of ailments. Fatigue on rising, which improves towards the end of the day, offers a strong clue to the possible diagnosis of low blood sugar. A subjective evaluation is never easy, for unless one is familiar with the diagnostic value of symptom patterns, it is very difficult to diagnose one’s own problems.
One of the chief characteristics of low blood sugar sufferers is the combination of physical and mental symptoms coupled with considerable variation in the symptoms. Sometimes the patient may feel on top of the world; at other times he or she may feel exhausted and depressed for no apparent reason. Remember, we are not dealing with a predictable organic disease such as arthritis or anaemia, but an imbalance in the nervous, circulatory, digestive and endocrine systems. Therefore any symptoms may be the expression of a great number of interrelating and fluctuating causes. These causes can include diet, emotional state, menstruation, time of day, stress, fatigue, the side effects of drugs and many other factors.
Past health
No illness suddenly arrives. There are always changes in the body before the symptoms become apparent to the patient. With low blood sugar the early symptoms are usually vague and difficult to identify. The commonest symptoms are fatigue associated with a dulling of concentration, irritability and mild anxiety or depression, feeling thick-headed on waking and a distinct loss of zest before mid-morning.
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