How Sugar Affects Diabetes
Causes of High Blood Sugar
When you have diabetes, certain things can cause your blood sugar to rise, including:
- Being sick
- Stress
- Overeating foods with sugar or carbs
- Being less active than normal
- Missing doses of insulin
- Your diabetes medicine isn’t working well
- Taking steroids or other medicines
- Recovering from surgery
Diabetes Diagnosis
Doctors use these tests to find out if you have diabetes and prediabetes:
Fasting plasma glucose test. The doctor tests your blood sugar levels after fasting for 8 hours. A level higher than 126 mg/dL indicates you have diabetes, while 100 to 125 mg/dL means you may have prediabetes.
A1c test. This test averages your blood sugar level over a few months. A level below 5.7% is normal, while between 5.7% and 6.4% means you have prediabetes.
Any sugar levels higher than normal are unhealthy. Levels that are higher than normal, but not reaching the point of diabetes, are called prediabetes.
According to the American Diabetes Association, 96 million people in the U.S. have this condition, which can lead to diabetes if you don’t make healthy lifestyle changes that your doctor suggests. It also raises the risk for heart disease, although not as much as diabetes does. It’s possible to keep prediabetes from becoming diabetes with diet and exercise.
High Blood Sugar
What are the dangers of high blood sugar? Glucose is precious fuel for all the cells in your body when it’s present at normal levels. But it can behave like a slow-acting poison.
High sugar levels slowly make cells in your pancreas less able to make insulin. The organ overcorrects, and insulin levels stay too high. Over time, the pancreas is forever damaged.
