Sugar is Corrosive

Sugar isn’t poison. It’s the main fuel for your body. We all need some sugar in our blood. Sugar is a highly reactive fuel that's supposed to leave your stomach quickly, travel through the blood, and then be absorbed into your hungry cells and burned for energy. To maintain good health and avoid diabetic complications a person with diabetes needs to manage how much sugar is in the blood at any one time and for how long. You see sugar is a great energy source, but it’s also corrosive. Trapped sugars in the blood accelerate the corrosive damage to blood vessels and leads to the breakdown of important body tissues and to the diabetic complications that cause failing health.

I like to use rusting to describe what goes on in your blood when sugars are not controlled. Rusting is a slow destructive process that takes time to develop and is easily overlooked. If allowed to progress unchecked, it can cause the eventual destruction of a bike left out in the rain. Knowing this, we protect it by keeping it out of the elements. That way we reduce the risk that rust is going to do any serious damage.

In the same way knowing how to use the 5 M's of Diabetic Care (Monitor-Meals-Motion-Medication-Motivation) to help self-regulate your blood sugars and keep them in a healthier range, you'll be able to avoid most of the corrosive damage associated with diabetes and lower your risk of complications.

The corrosive damage caused by sugar can be measured in everyone, even if they don’t have diabetes, by using a simple blood test called Hemoglobin A1c (abbreviated HgbA1c). Hemoglobin is the protein that carries oxygen and makes blood red. (You may be familiar with this test and I hope you’re able to have it done several times each year) Your red blood cells live about 3 months, so it’s a convenient way to measure the amount of damage (glycation) present and determine average blood sugar levels during the 3 months before the test. A person without diabetes will have between 4.8% and 5.5% damage to their red blood cells (hemoglobin) from the corrosive effect of sugar. This causes little damage and is easily repaired in a healthy person. In a person with uncontrolled diabetes HgbA1c damage can range as high as 17%. This means that blood sugar has been nearly 500 for the past 3 months.

Remember this test also indicates that blood vessels, and internal tissues themselves are being damaged in the same way. It’s this high level of blood vessel damage that causes diabetic complications. A healthy HgbA1c for a person with diabetes is somewhere below 7%. That would be about 140 on your blood sugar monitor. This is still in a range that's considered diabetic, but research shows that when corrosive damage is kept low like this, your body can keep up with the repair to your blood vessels and internal organs, and the risk for diabetic complications is significantly lower.

So it’s fair to say that it’s uncontrolled diabetes that leads to damage and failed health, because the damage is happening faster than your body can repair it.

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