10 Harmful BLOOD SUGAR MYTHS Your Doctor Still Believes
Hello Health Champions. Today we're going to talk about 10 harmful blood sugar myths that
most doctors still believe. The first one is that blood sugar from carbohydrates would be
our primary source of energy. That your body depends and can't function without this energy
source. So here's how it really works that if you eat 80% of your calories as carbohydrate then 80
percent of your energy will also come from dietary carbohydrates, whereas if you only ate 10% of
your calories from carbohydrates then 10% of your energy would come from dietary carbohydrates. It's
as simple as that there is no rocket science here however if your body is metabolically flexible
then it can switch from one energy source to another whereas if you've trained it to only
use one such as carbohydrate then it might have a hard time switching back and forth but even if
you eat 80% of your calories from carbohydrate you're still probably only going to get about
50 percent of your energy from blood sugar and the reason is that Sugar can turn into fat for
storage so if you eat carbohydrates you raise your blood sugar whatever you don't use in this moment
has to be stored as glycogen or converted into fat so a lot of the carbs you eat will get first
turned into fat and then we use that energy from fat but what we have to realize is that equation
can't go the other way we can turn sugar to fat but we can can't turn fat to Sugar we do
not have the enzymes as humans to do that now this is truth with slight modification because
you can't turn fat to Sugar but the way that we store fat the way we store most of the energy on
our bodies is as triglycerides so we store those fatty acids the fat on a backbone of glycerol and
that glycerol does turn into glucose into blood sugar and that accounts for about five percent of
all the energy that you store as fat so we can't turn fat to Sugar but we still have a few percent
of carbohydrates stored in that fat so to speak so in terms of blood sugar being the most important
energy source that's a big myth because fat is a better energy source it runs clean and it provides
very very stable energy that's why we store our extra energy on the body as fat myth number two
is that the brain can only use glucose for energy that it has no other energy sources and that's
simply not true but I can see where people might start thinking that because on a high carb diet
if you get most of your calories from carbohydrate then you will have pretty much 100% of the brain's
energy from glucose but a lot of people will now jump to the conclusion that that means the
glucose is the preferred fuel because it uses it first and it's the other way around it's the
exact opposite that glucose is an emergency when we have something called hyperglycemia
meaning blood sugar that is too high that is an emergency a very high level can put you into
a coma so if we just ate a bunch of carbs and absorbed all that glucose and it wouldn't take
very much even because on average you have about three to four grams of glucose as blood sugar so
if you increase that tenfold that means you ate 30 to 40 grams of carbohydrate you absorbed it
but your body didn't bother dealing with it to get it out of there you would have a blood sugar
in the range of a thousand and you would be in a coma so we can have hyperglycemia which is
an emergency we could also have hyperlipidemia or hyper proteinemia which is high fat or high
protein but those are not emergencies there is no necessary hormone for the body to release to deal
immediately short term with high lipids or high protein but if we have high glucose that is an
emergency and we have to deal with that right now and that's why in the first few minutes of eating
glucose or carbohydrate we will have a response in the form of insulin to deal with that glucose and
that's why we use it first if on the other hand you do a low carb diet you do ketosis or just low
carb now you'll have only about 25 percent of your energy to the brain coming from glucose of course
it's a sliding scale it's going to start at 100% and work its way down as you eat less carbs as
your body starts burning more fat and producing some ketones but there's some good evidence that
the brain doesn't even need that much glucose because they've done done some studies where
they had people who fasted for a few days so they're fat adapted they're well into producing
ketones at a healthy level which is about three to four millimoles and these people they injected
them with insulin to try to push the glucose down artificially and see what would happen to see if
they could induce some neurological symptoms of hypoglycemia but they injected them with insulin
and they got their glucose down as low as 9 which is about 10 percent of a normal level but even at
only 10 percent glucose the brain was doing just fine they had no symptoms at all of hypoglycemia
so what that means is the brain was probably at that point running at 90 percent of its energy
from ketones so chances are the brain doesn't need glucose at all it just uses it if it's available
and normally we would never get as low as 9 or 10 in blood glucose because the body will always
have some carbohydrate floating around anyway like I mentioned fat is stored together with
some glycerol that will turn into glucose so we're always going to have some glucose sitting around
and that's probably why it levels off around 25 percent but here's the problem when we're told
over and over that carbohydrate is the foundation of our energy production now we start believing
other things as well such as that if you don't eat a breakfast if you don't eat carbohydrates
on a regular basis if you don't top off your blood sugar now you won't have any brain energy
you won't have any Focus you can't concentrate if your kids don't eat cereal for breakfast they
won't make it to lunch then get bad grades and so on so all these different myths they're easy to
believe because when we eat this way we also develop a carb dependency that means you eat
some carbohydrates and then your blood sugar goes up the insulin brings it back down but now as soon
as it's low you fill it back up so your body learns that there's every two hours every so
often there's going to be some new carbohydrate so now you start depending on that type of energy
delivery and now if you miss a meal or if you skip a meal or if you cut back dramatically on
your carbohydrates now your body won't know where to get the energy from because you trained it into
only using carbohydrates and blood glucose now if you were to quit cold turkey like you'd just go
on a fast or you just go straight into keto what's going to happen is your body is not going to have
its usual fuel source its usual energy source so you're going to feel really lousy for about
two to three days while the body shifts around its metabolic pathways from carbohydrate to fat
and it starts making some ketones and then you will be totally fine but most people never get
through the two to three days because they're afraid that something is wrong now another way
better than cold turkey I believe is just cut down the carbs by maybe 10 percent per day or every
few days and now your body will transition much more smoothly and you won't have these bad days
so because the brain does have multiple fuels then that is also a myth myth number three is that this
blood sugar is only a problem as we age any again it's easy to see where this comes from because the
majority of people over 65 have poor blood sugar handling or or even diabetic but it doesn't mean
it doesn't start earlier and because of so many different factors that we didn't have a hundred
years ago such as an abundance of processed foods we have guidelines that tell us to eat almost all
carbohydrates we have more sedentary Lifestyles we live more with computers we're busier we don't
move we don't go outside and we have more snacks there's more snack availability plus we're told
that we have to eat them to top off our blood sugar and some other relatively new factors like
seed oils that promote insulin resistance and metabolic disease as well as overeating because
everything has chemical additives and chemical flavorings that trick the brain into eating more
than we normally should so for all these reasons it doesn't take so long to break your metabolism
anymore and as a result we're seeing metabolic disease blood sugar problems type 2 diabetes going
further and further down in ages until we have it a lot in the teens and even in pre-teens so
type 2 diabetes used to be called adult onset diabetes but that's not so much the case even
though it mostly affects the elderly it it more and more it's affecting all ages so again it's a
myth that we shouldn't worry about it till we're older myth number four is that all different types
of sugar are pretty much the same they affect the blood sugar the same way so there's two issues we
have to understand here one is the glycemic index which is basically a measurement of how
quickly something that we eat raises blood sugar and then related to that is glycemic load which
basically just says how much of that thing are you eating and anything that drives up blood sugar is
going to create an insulin response and over time create insulin resistance and once we have insulin
resistance that means the body is resisting the action of insulin which is to help the glucose
into the cells so with insulin resistance the sugar can't get out of the bloodstream as well
and now blood sugar levels rise and insulin levels rise because the body thinks it has to produce
more and more insulin to handle this glucose that the cells don't want anymore but there's
also a second mechanism that has to do with a fatty liver a non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
and that's a different mechanism but it turns out to be even stronger in terms of producing
insulin resistance and metabolic disease and here is why sugars affect the body very differently so
if we start off with what's called a disaccharide which means that there are two glucose molecules
linked up with the bond so it monosaccharide would be just one ring two rings would be a
disaccharide and if both of these are glucose then this is something we call maltose that's the name
of that sugar and this has a glycemic index of a hundred and five so that's interesting that
one of these which goes out almost instantly has a glycemic index of a hundred but when they're
linked up then for some reason in the body that produces an even higher glycemic index and even
faster blood sugar response so where does maltose come from is that something we eat a lot well if
you've heard of starch if you've heard of complex carbohydrates that is what that is if we link
these rings together glucose by glucose if we link them by the hundreds or by the thousands they're
called starch and as soon as you eat that rice or that bread you start chopping off little units of
these huge chains and this happens very quickly in terms of minutes and when we chop off a two ring
unit that's called maltose this is exactly what we're getting and we have a glycemic response
that's very very high from this but we don't have to change a whole lot if this ring stays the same
but this ring becomes something called galactose now this sugar is called lactose so the first ring
is the same that's glucose but the second ring is different instead of glucose it's something
called galactose now this blood sugar response slows down dramatically we're down to 45 which
is much much slower so it's still a sugar and we shouldn't overload on lactose either especially if
we're sensitive to lactose if we don't have the enzyme to break it down but this sugar is very
very different even though on the surface it looks very similar the next sugar is the one we really
want to understand so if we have this same first ring being glucose but the second ring is fructose
now this is table sugar sucrose and the problem here is that this fructose behaves very very
differently the glucose in all of these will tend to raise blood sugar but to different degrees
however this fructose does not raise blood sugar very much but it has the same effect on the liver
pretty much really close as what alcohol does because fructose and alcohol can only be processed
by the liver so the tendency to overload the liver is very very high so if you drink a half
a bottle of whiskey every day then that alcohol is basically going to plug up the liver but the same
thing happens if you drink a bunch of sugar if you eat sugar if you drink sugar if you eat high
fructose corn syrup or drink high fructose corn syrup the same thing happens because this fructose
is going to overload your liver it's going to create a non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and
move your whole metabolic disease toward insulin resistance so these are called disaccharides and
we can't absorb these the way they are we need to break this bond with an enzyme and maltase lactase
sucrase however once we have broken it now these are called monosaccharides so again if we break
these so they're floating around by themselves now they're monosaccharides and now we basically
have what's called high fructose corn syrup and if we have glucose by itself the glycemic index
is a hundred if we have fructose by itself it is about 25 and that's why sucrose or table sugar
has a glycemic index of 65 it kind of sits in the middle however high fructose corn syrup because
these are floating around freely we don't have to break that Bond first so this gets out even
faster and the glucose goes straight into the bloodstream at a number 100 and the fructose goes
to the liver and clogs it up so basically from an insulin resistance and Liver Health standpoint we
need to understand that glucose is bad because it drives insulin but fructose is worse now fructose
exists in table sugar and in high fructose corn syrup and also in all fruits and in all
juices but it doesn't exist in starch so if you eat rice or potato it doesn't get in from there
and also in milk it's a different sugar so we don't get fructose from those and that's why
we need to be especially careful with things that come with table sugar high fructose corn syrup and
from fruit and especially juices so how bad these are depends on how much fructose they have so
most high fructose corn syrup is about 55 percent fructose that's why it's called high but it starts
already at 42 so that's not really high fructose that's kind of low fructose corn syrup but it's
still bad because you have the glucose to raise blood sugar and you have the fructose to clog the
liver and this can go all the way up to 90 percent of fructose and then there are natural things like
honey and even though honey has some benefits and it has some other things in there it basically
can consists entirely of glucose and fructose so it has about four parts fructose to three parts
glucose on average it depends on what kind of bees make it and where they reside and so forth but
for all intents and purposes honey is just a high fructose syrup that's what it is in terms of blood
sugar now that's not all bad because the glycemic index of Honey is really low and if you're insulin
sensitive if you don't need to avoid carbohydrates very strictly then honey would be a better source
of sugar because it's natural because it has a very low glycemic index and if you're not insulin
resistant then a small amount of fructose is not going to hurt you it hurts you when the doses
start becoming toxic which Unfortunately they have become for most of the population and another very
common misconception is agave which is basically Cactus syrup they make tequila from that and Agave
is another high fructose syrup it can go anywhere from about 55 percent and all the way up to 90
percent so even though again the glycemic index is relatively low if you are insulin resistant if
you have a fatty liver then this is the last thing that you want so again sugars are very different
so this is clearly a myth myth number five is that orange juice would somehow be healthy and
a good food for diabetics and people with blood sugar handling problems because it's natural well
if you understand what we talked about that it doesn't matter if it occurs naturally in the food
or if it's in white sugar once we turn it into juice that that juice that sugar is available
just as fast or faster than sugar you understand that it doesn't matter if it's added sugar or not
it's still that same sugar and juices have 50 percent glucose 50 fructose it's going to give
or take plus minus five percent depending on the fruit but these are basically all the sugars that
are in there you're getting glucose and fructose no matter what so that is another huge myth number
six is that small frequent meals would help blood sugar now I guess you could say that's true if by
that you mean that it helps raise blood sugar but of course that's the last thing that you want so
what this really does what frequent meals do is that they perpetuate a dependence on carbohydrate
and they perpetuate unstable blood sugar blood sugar roller coaster and again it's not rocket
science that if you have if you eat something and it raises blood sugar and then you release some
insulin and it brings it down and then you trained your body to eat carbohydrate every couple hours
then every time your blood sugar drops a little bit you're going to get hungry you're going to
get a craving because you trained your body into doing that and if you eat small frequent meals
then your blood sugar is going to go like this throughout the day and every time blood sugar is
down you're going to reinforce this dependency on carbohydrates you're going to want to have
something to eat all the time that your blood sugar drops a little bit and along those lines
we also often hear that it is dangerous it's bad for you or even dangerous to skip a meal or to do
some fasting because then what would happen is you couldn't function apparently when your blood sugar
dropped a little bit it and I get it that's why there are so few humans left on the planet because
every time that they had a pizza party and they forgot to save some for the morning after then
they just wiped out they didn't have any energy when they woke up so they couldn't go and find
more food and I'm joking of course we've function often even better when we start breaking down some
fat and making some ketones very often the mind and the Brain sharpens so that we can be more
effective in going out and finding that food now they do have a slight point there is one category
of people where it can be dangerous to skip a meal and that is if you are on insulin therapy
so this would be primarily a type 1 diabetic so if you're on an insulin pump for example that dishes
out insulin so you eat something and the insulin pump on automatically kicks out insulin but then
you don't eat again and it kicks out some more insulin now that blood sugar could hit dangerously
low levels because you're not fat adapted you don't have any ketones so now when the blood
sugar goes low you become truly hypoglycemic and you can go into a coma because of low blood sugar
theoretically that could happen to a type 2 diabetic but it would be much much harder
because even if you're on insulin you already have too much insulin so adding a little bit more isn't
going to make a dramatic difference because your cells are so resistant to that insulin
so you might drop down a little bit below what you're used to but it would probably not reach
dangerous levels so that's another myth small frequent meals help perpetuate the imbalance
and the problem myth number seven is that complex carbohydrates help control blood sugar now let's
look at a few different foods if we compare sugar white bread and whole wheat bread because we hear
all the time that sugar is terrible you should limit that white Bread's not so great but whole
wheat is the best thing that you could eat you should eat as much brown rice and whole wheat
bread and complex carbs as possible but let's see how they actually impact blood sugar so sugar
table sugar sucrose has a glycemic index of 65. white bread is quite a bit worse meaning
it raises blood sugar faster at 75 and then whole wheat which is supposed to be so much better is
74. so like just over one percent better which is minuscule so from a blood sugar perspective
there is no difference there is no significant difference yes one has a little bit of fiber
it has a few more minerals and vitamins but if we're looking to handle and control blood sugar
there really is no difference and yet these recommendations are on every official site
every list every agency that you can find and so often it's that we can't get away from the idea
of what we're supposed to eat and we think that what we've been eating for the last 30 years is
what it has to be it has to be all this bread and pasta and rice and processed foods and so on but
very often it's simply that wheat whole wheat is a little better than something else so yeah it is
insignificantly better than white bread and sure I would agree that it's better than jelly beans
it is better than Coca-Cola it is better than Donuts but it doesn't make it good but we need
to eat are things like meat and nuts and eggs and low starch vegetables leafy greens avocados and
things like that because their glycemic index runs in the single digits or in the teens so those are
foods that truly will control blood sugar but you have to shift your mind and understand that you
can actually eat those things that's what our ancestors used to eat myth number seven better
than does not mean good myth number eight is that protein does not affect blood sugar so we have to
understand what the purpose of protein is first of all it can only do two things and number one is to
become become a building block as you want to make new tissues as you wear out different body parts
and you make new cells then protein is needed for those replacement parts but anything that doesn't
become tissue any protein you eat that does not turn into building blocks and tissue is excess
it's extra it's left over and it will be turned into glucose you can't store protein other than in
the tissue so if it doesn't become tissue it will become glucose now this is very very insignificant
amount and speed compared to eating sugar or carbohydrate but we still need to point it out to
understand that this is how it works and therefore if you're really really trying to be strict with
a protein with with your blood sugar then you should not eat excess protein you should not
load up on protein just because you think it has zero impact and you know this to be true because
on your blood test is something called BUN blood urea nitrogen and this nitrogen is the residue
from the protein as we turn the amino acid into glucose there's a nitrogen residue that ends up
in the bloodstream so if you eat a huge excess of protein then your bun is going to go up but the
next thing to understand is that most protein in nature comes packaged with fat so a lot of people
who eat carnivore they understand this people only eat animal products they don't necessarily eat all
that much protein so if you for example if you eat a juicy steak or some ground beef that has
what they call 80 lean 20 fat then the calorie distribution is actually 27 of calories from
protein and 73 from fat so even someone who is carnivore that you think they often tell you
and and people often think that they eat nothing but protein and yet it's almost three quarters
of their energy from fat which is a good stable fuel source so even eating nothing but meat these
people probably still don't overload or don't overload very much on protein so it's a myth
that protein has no impact on blood sugar but the impact is not very large unless you were to eat
huge amounts if you really try to focus on getting a lot of protein from lean sources like chicken
breast now it is quite easy to overload on protein and then we get into the medical handling of these
issues and this is where we really need to understand how harmful these myths are myth
number nine is the type 2 diabetes would be best detected and managed by measuring glucose and A1C
so what does that mean if we'd run a very common blood test glucose is on virtually every blood
test and I think it should be then the lab range says it should be between 70 to 100 milligrams per
deciliter which for the average person means you have about three to four grams of glucose floating
around in your bloodstream at any given time and not as common but it is getting pretty common and
something that absolutely need to be on a blood test is hemoglobin A1c which they say should be
below 5 0.7 and hemoglobin A1c is simply a protein in your red blood cell in your hemoglobin and the
more sugar that you have in the bloodstream at any given time the more sugar is going to
stick to that protein in the red blood cell and the average red blood cell lives about a hundred
days so by measuring how much sugar is stuck as a percentage we get a rough estimate a pretty good
estimate of what the glucose is over a hundred day period and both of these are very inexpensive and
simple I think they should be on every blood test but glucose fluctuates all the time and
we don't get a whole lot of information from it A1C is a much better marker but still has huge
limitations which we'll talk about in a second now I believe that a healthy glucose should be more so
in the 80s I think by the time you're creeping up toward 100 there's already an issue and if
you're doing fasting or a ketogenic diet then it's okay for it to drop below the 80s your A1C I think
should be below 5.4 5.3 somewhere around that by the time it's 5.7 you're already very close
to pre-diabetic and you have some significant momentum going in the wrong direction so those
two need to be on every blood test but here's why it's a grave mistake to rely on those two alone
let's say that you start off with a normal blood glucose and then while you are healthy
it takes a certain amount of insulin which is also a healthy level to control that
and then let's say that a few years go by and you check it again and your glucose is normal once
more but if they only measure glucose and A1C then they're going to get the glucose which is
instantaneous they're going to get the A1C which is a hundred day average but here's the point
both of those markers glucose and A1C are controlled variables the body works very very
hard at keeping it down like we've talked about throughout here high blood sugar is an emergency
the body starts counteracting it within minutes because it's dangerous if you were to absorb
that entire meal of carbohydrate even if it's just 30 40 grams and you did not get any blood
sugar out you would be in a coma before that meal was absorbed so sugar blood sugar is a controlled
variable so let's say that five years later it the blood sugar is still controlled at that level
but it takes two to three times more insulin to control it now if we only measure glucose
in A1C we won't find it but if we measure insulin we'll see hey this is this is changing something
is increasing here we wait another five years glucose is still normal it's probably still
right in in this range right here but now that insulin is up five-fold so the point here is that
because it's controlled we can't notice a difference we can't find anything on that
marker until the body has failed to control it so the basically the whole system has to be
broken your carbohydrate tolerance machine has to break before we can see any changes on those two
markers so then five years later again now we see that it's gone over a hundred so it's gone from
let's say 90 to 120 and now your A1C is probably around six and your insulin is probably Sky High
so if we understand you can't measure you can't rely on a marker on a variable
that is so tightly regulated because glucose is going to change like this
and only change when the body fails whereas if we measure insulin which is the thing controlling it
we're going to see an almost linear change so this is a huge and harmful myth and perhaps one of my
biggest pet peeves with anything about diabetes and blood sugar handling and myth number 10 is
equally harmful and a grave mistake and that says that all we have to do to treat diabetes and blood
sugar problems is to control the blood sugar but blood sugar is not one problem it's two problems
that one obviously is the high blood sugar but the second one is the high insulin and when we have
chronically High insulin we have what's called insulin resistance the insulin isn't working so
the body makes more the cells are resisting so the body makes even more and so on and so on and
this leads to metabolic disease metabolic syndrome and this is the number one cause of all the things
that kill people 95 of degenerative disease is related to these factors so we have cardiovascular
disease we have stroke we have dementia cancer high blood pressure and the list goes on and on
and it is about insulin resistance and metabolic disease but here's why this myth number 10 is so
dangerous as we become more insulin resistant over time the insulin increases until we get to a point
where the cells are so insulin resistant that even this huge amount of insulin doesn't keep the blood
sugar under control so the thinking now is the body isn't making enough insulin let's add some
more so even though your body has all this insulin produced by itself they add exogenously they
inject it so now when you add even more insulin then for a while you will control blood glucose
you have the desired effect of lowering blood glucose a little bit so you're handling problem
number one to a degree but the other problem is that you are increasing insulin resistance the
bigger problem you're making it worse by adding this additional insulin these people already
have too much insulin and we're adding more so we're making them sicker we're lowering their
blood glucose at the expense of their health so the better solution and the only solution is
to address the root cause and the root cause is that you have eaten more carbohydrate than your
body can tolerate that doesn't mean you ate more carbohydrate than the next guy it just means you
ate too much for you you broke your carbohydrate tolerance machine and if we cut back on the sugar
and the carbohydrate and the frequency of meals and all the things that raise insulin now we will
address both of these we will lower both the blood glucose and the insulin resistance and
if you think that sounds too simple to just lower carbs and address the root cause then
you're in good company most people never give that a try because they've heard too many of
these myths and they haven't met enough people or they it seems too far-fetched that you could
fix it by yourself that easily now realize it doesn't work a hundred percent but it
works probably around 95 to 98% and if I were you then I would take those odds and run with it and
give it a try you see what happens and then you learn as much as you can about this if you happen
to be in the few percent where it doesn't solve it then you really need to understand why and figure
out what's going on. And for those of you who want to dive a little deeper in figuring out how
to catch things early, I've created a blood work course and you can find some more information on
that down below. If you enjoyed this video you're going to love that one and if you truly want to
master Health by understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe, hit that
bell and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video.