The first thing you’ll want to know when advised that you either have type 2 diabetes, or are at risk of it, is what is normal blood sugar level?
After all, how can you attempt to regulate and maintain a healthy level if you don’t know what it is?
You may want to know that you can perform your own blood sugar tests by purchasing kits online. This can help with your regulation or even assessing whether you have diabetes or not. You can find an excellent supplier here.
Blood Sugar
When you eat your body releases a substance called insulin. Its role is to transfer the sugar your eat into energy to power your body. However, if there is too much sugar in your blood it will store it as fat instead.
This is healthy; you never know when you may need to survive off your fat stores.
However sugar is introduced to your body through sugary products and unrefined carbs. These are quickly processed and cause a spike in your blood sugar levels.
Again, this is normal until your body struggles to cope with the influx of sugars. This is usually after you have not eating healthily for many years.
The Right Blood Sugar Level
There are several different readings that every person will get.
The first is the ‘normal’. This is what you would expect your blood sugar level to be between meals.
The second is the high; this is the spike after a meal and is fine providing it is within the right range.
The third reading is when you’re blood sugar levels have actually dropped to low; you need sugar fast!
A non diabetic should have a reading of between 4 and 5.9 mmol/L before they eat and a reading of less than 7.8 mmol/L for up to 90 minutes after they eat.
If you have type 2 diabetes you are likely to be between 4 and 7 mmol/L before you eat and as high as 8.5mmol/L for the 90 minutes after you’ve eaten.
People with type 1 diabetes will have the same pre meal range as type 2 but the after eating level will be as high as 9mmol/L.
In short, to b in the normal range you need to have between 4 and 5.9 before eating and no higher than 7.8 after eating.
Testing To Check
You can purchase your own blood sugar levels testing kits. These will assess the amount of sugar in your blood at any given time and will help you to understand whether you have or are at risk of having type 2 diabetes.
The closer you are to the extremes of the normal range the more likely it is you are in a pre-diabetes stage.
However, it is important to visit a doctor for more in depth tests. These will focus not just on what your blood sugar level is they can also give you a glucose tolerance test which can be extremely useful at assessing your risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
