[Music] hey everybody welcome back to the show great to have you here on our crawl concept 2160 that is today's episode if you'd like to follow along with all the links and the research you can head on over to stephencabral.com forward slash 2160. now today's topic actually came about as a reader request or i should say many listeners requests over time asking for you have so many shows on helping people to lower high blood sugar and to stabilize normal blood sugar so they can have better mental cognition better energy better weight loss all those things what about for people that have low blood sugar and there's so many people out there that have low blood sugar and don't even know it maybe it would be helpful for them as well and i said all right i get it i understand makes total sense to me let's do a show on it so i just want you to know whenever there is a great call for something and i've gotten many dozens of questions over time on the same topic if i haven't already covered it which most likely i have but if i haven't already covered it i certainly will and just keep in mind i do short shows like short uh three four-minute answers on each individual question on the weekends too so everything is searchable at stevencabral.com forward slash podcasts and literally it's all searchable right there at the search box so we try to make that as easy as possible and you can come up with a lot of different keywords to find your specific topic so today's specific topic would be under low blood sugar or hypoglycemia and those would be the two main keywords okay so before i get into the show i just have to give you that medical disclaimer that we are not here to give you any medical advice any medical treatment plans or any medical based cures only your licensed medical doctor could possibly do that so what we're doing here today is providing you with health-based education and this is in no way intended to treat diabetes okay so i just want to share with you some health based information that i've used in my practice now for 25 years seeing well over a quarter of a million people and i myself dealt with highs and lows in blood sugar so many of you know my story you know that i had addison's disease autoimmune issues myosin encephalomyelitis pots etc but i also had type 2 diabetes so the way that you are you figure out if you have diabetes is typically have a hemoglobin a1c above 5.7 or above or you fail a glucose tolerance test and that's exactly what happened to me so after three hours my blood sugar had still not come back down well this led to being diagnosed with all these particular issues because with me addison's disease and adrenal based issues is what led to my diabetes now that's the thing is you know diabetes or i should say type 2 diabetes is typically a result of something else that's basically it i wasn't necessarily overweight i wasn't a typical candidate for type 2 diabetes i was only 17 years old pretty healthy overall meaning like looked healthy in air quotes if you're watching this on video because that's what the doctors would tell me but but i ended up with type 2 diabetes and mine was adrenal based remember there's always an underlying root cause and then of course there was an underlying root cause for my adrenal issues we'll get into that in just a moment but what i wanted to share with you is that if you're dealing with shakiness lightheadedness headaches a couple hours after a meal unable to concentrate i had difficulty focusing your eyes low mood nervous anxiety irritability ups and downs and hunger overall state of confusion right these are all symptoms of low blood sugar and most people would never know that it's affecting them or maybe it's only every once in a while and there's certainly people that are far more prone to it so for example the vata or vata pita body type far more prone to hypoglycemia which is low blood sugar now low blood sugar if you would actually test it right at home and you can do so with a simple glucometer you don't even need a continuous glucose monitor but i will talk about that later in the show and then i'll link back to previous shows on a cgm but literally this 20 device that you can do right at home little finger prick that's all that it is you test your blood sugar and you see are you between 70 and uh 90 or 95 milligrams per deciliter and if you are okay you're within the healthy range but if you're not and you're below a 70 uh let's say like sometimes i'd be at 48 or 52. like for really low blood sugar you feel like you're lightheaded like you're almost going to pass out that's very low blood sugar in the 60s you're definitely going to feel it a lot of people feel fine walking around the 60s for blood sugar i don't necessarily recommend it especially if you're exercising while fasted or you're doing a sauna or you're doing a cold plunge where you might get like a surge of adrenaline or stress hormone and if the sugar is not there you could definitely pass out and so it's not a safe thing to do especially in a sauna in a workout or in a cold blunch so so do be cognizant of that you really want to take care of your overall health and not push your bio hacking or fasting to too high a level i also wanted to share with you that when the blood sugar starts to get really low you may start to feel nauseous you may start getting help heart palpitations you might see visible shakiness of your hands and your anxiety might start to go through the roof so these are all really important i was working with a uh long time client of mine and unbeknownst to me he was doing omad which is one meal a day dieting uh and he's a go go go type of person uh you know he's uh you would know him he's uh he's a very well known um we'll say celebrity and i just said and they they basically text me and i'm being careful with what i say so don't give away any client confidentiality but um they were having issues around this and they didn't know what it was and they ended up uh passing out at some inopportune times not there is not that there isn't in an opportune time unless i guess you're actually in bed but here's the issue i had to go through what's going on what changed what are the different variables because you know the way that i'm able to uh reduce and deduce what is actually going on is to look at variables and then as we started to talk more i said oh you know what are you doing for nutrition like well i've actually been doing one meal a day uh and i was i was shocked because that is not the plan that i put together for them and again like i'm obviously i'm not gonna scold them you know i'm not that type of person i said okay you know here's what might be happening and so we went back we looked at it and theirs was actually uh low blood sugar low blood pressure and low heart rate and so that is a recipe for disaster if those are not if those are not balanced so other ones when it's starting to get bad is going to be blurred vision so beyond kind of difficulty focusing i've mentioned the nausea before um kind of losing the the blood in the face you might start to look much more pale and just overall unsteady unbalance so i just want you to make sure that you're looking out for those and then of course test your blood sugar again it's a 20 glucometer i'll link it up today just go to stephencabral.com forward slash 2160 and you know all my resources are always at stevencabral.com forward slash resources i've got over 100 resources that i personally use and that i use in my practice and with my family so what are the main causes then for hypoglycemia or low blood sugar because again we're not diagnosing any disease here well a big one is people drinking alcohol believe it or not alcohol even though there might be sugar etc in it i'm not going to get too deep into whether there's sugar or not in alcohol and how alcohol carbs are different than regular carbs it doesn't really matter for today's discussion what does matter is that you'll typically drop into a hypo glycemia low blood sugar during the night and that is because i and i've said it before and again it's not i do drink alcohol so it's not that i don't i don't want to pretend like i'm you know this um person who abstains from everything that's not the case i don't drink alcohol very often that's that's for sure and i drink alcohol like even less um outside of like the summer months where i might have it one drink a week and i know that you know a lot of people probably laughing like oh that's so outrageous uh but that that's basically it uh maybe two that's it uh but for sure it's typically one or two drinks maximum per month and it's always just now with friends or out at a nice meal or something like that where it's it's more about the atmosphere and community but anyway alcohol truly is a poison in the body a lot of people try to justify it doctors experts etc etc saying oh well there's this benefit and that benefit remember all the benefits that you would get from alcohol can be gotten from outside of alcohol like if you want it from the grapes and the antioxidants well you can certainly get that from eating grapes and high antioxidant foods uh that i've chatted about on a couple previous podcasts but regardless of how you feel that that's okay i mean either way is is fine again i'm here to support people if they want to have a couple drinks a week that's that's totally up to them but i would definitely look at the research i presented to you on drinking alcohol multiple times per week uh more than two to three times a week is certainly certainly going to be detrimental for your overall health dis-ease and longevity so not good for those but what happens is when your liver is dealing with the alcohol it's not able to properly process the signals from the pancreas which is released in a hormone called glucagon that is meant to br excuse me it's meant to break down uh glycogen store glycogen in the liver and it's if it's not getting those signals if it's not receiving them uh or openly receiving them because it's dealing with ethanol the alcohol then it's not gonna be able to bring more sugar back in the bloodstream to keep you stabilized now again this has been really perverted in the health and fitness industry like going as low in carbohydrates as possible going as low in sugar as possible and that's somehow a good thing trust me it is not your brain needs glucose contrary to the popular keto belief that your brain is going to run totally fine on ketones your brain can run on ketones it does it just fine but certainly there's a great price to be paid on the nervous system and again that's a show i've done another day so let's go to some other reasons all right this is an important one because there are people taking anti-malarial drugs so medications can also cause low blood sugar and anti-malarial drugs believe it or not are some of those being used right now to treat this current virus so it's good to know that if you're on these anti-malarials that you may actually drop in a hypoglycemia so be aware of the symptoms right and i'm going to give you the fix in just a moment antibiotics could do this as well and then same with um drugs for pneumonia okay now i know that certain antibiotics are prescribed for pneumonia but there are certain drugs as well specific to pneumonia another one is anorexia so there may be people who are eating too little i guess in aurexia bulimia could be in this part as well if you're not getting enough calories certainly that could be one cause any liver-based disease or kidney-based disease can certainly cause this kidney-based disease is not going to filter out medications as well food as well proteins as well it's going to really throw off your blood overall and that includes blood sugar with liver i already spoke about that before if your liver is not is inflamed and it's not receiving signals properly you're not going to be able to process glucagon to then release more glucose from the liver and i'll talk just a moment on the adrenals so as someone that had addison's disease and again had i'm a perfectly healthy human being right now overcame all of my different diagnosed diseases even though i was told i'd be living with a lifetime of disease uh that didn't happen luckily for me right and i guess there was no luck at all the only luck is reading thousands of books and uh you know spending money to go see good doctors taking all sorts of different protocols and and finally you know there is always the fortune of meeting my mentor dr pete who really helped me put it all together and obviously having great parents who you know supported me and took me from specialist to specialist doctor to doctor et cetera so you know there's a lot of there's a lot of pieces to this of course you know we never do anything completely on our own but i can tell you that if you listen to doctors you will be disease ridden for the rest of your life there's always an underlying root cause the problem with addison's disease if that you're not producing enough cortisol which is a glucocorticoid then you're typically running down your blood sugar levels and then when you eat you can spike them and then you're not having proper insulin insulin production so it's a mess so you're running highs and lows all day in blood sugar so sometimes that would be really low in blood sugar and then sometimes it'd be really high in blood sugar and my body was not able to regulate that very well so that is certainly a problem so what i wanted to share with you now uh is how to get yourself out of this mess right because it's a short-term fix that regis dietitians are taught uh to help you with this or nurses as well and that's typically to give 15 grams of glucose and to then test your blood sugar 15 minutes later and then continue to give another 15 grams until it brings up blood sugar so the problem is and again i have a lot of respect for regis dietitians i mean we probably half of our equal life coaches are regis dietitians and um caitlin who runs the integrative health practitioner institute was one of my first health coaches is a regis dietitian and she's running out our entire ihp and again i have a lot of respect for rich dietitians very very smart individuals the problem is and they know it that their schooling even though it's a great education they move you in the wrong direction i mean even with regis dietitians they're telling people to you know drink milk chocolate milk after a workout these things are we know are not healthy these are not healthy things to do and for diabetics or other people they're telling them to keep a candy in their pocket and just kind of eat candy again these things are not uh fixes because then they allow people's blood sugar to get out of control be like oh just have some candy when you start to get low and it's it's bad advice the other thing too is oh just have you know orange juice or juice when you start to feel low the problem with that is this okay it fixes the hypoglycemia initially which sometimes you need to do you need to get quick glucose into your body if you are really dropping low in blood sugar there's no doubt about that but again i'm not here to give medical based advice so you know when i owned um a personal training body transformation nutrition studio we always kept orange juice in the refrigerator and that's because if anybody dropped too low in blood sugar which would sometimes happen set them down in a bun on a bench once we started to see kind of the blood move out of their face start to feel light-headed sip not chug sip on a little bit of orange juice over the next five minutes and all of a sudden their body would come back to life now we wouldn't let them continue their work i would say that's it for today and it wouldn't happen very often but you do want to have those precautions right so there is that but this is it i mean listen you can have a piece of fruit to bring up your blood sugar but it shouldn't just be that because the problem is your body's going to use that up and you'll most likely then drop back down and you drop back down faster if it's candy or it's juice so i have no problem with saying eat some fruit have an apple that's gonna be a little bit that's gonna be more than 15 grams but it's not much more have a cup of berries about 15 20 grams so all of these are totally fine they're great they work but really what you want to do is to have a meal that's going to have protein carbohydrates and a healthy fat so that you're getting carbs yes that's part of it but then you're also slowing the release of the carbohydrates with the protein which kind of increases thermogenic effect takes a little longer to break down and digest in the fat as well and i don't recommend going very high fat with any good carb meal uh it's it's not great for overall health body transformation etc now healthy amount of fat i'm all for but having 100 grams of fat at that meal probably not so what we do is we make sure in the long term if you're ever dropping into low blood sugar no problem you can have a piece of fruit i think it's a great idea but have a meal a half hour later 20 minutes later like have an actual meal to stabilize blood sugar so that you're just not up and down for the rest of the day have a piece of fruit oh and then it drops back down have it so you don't want to get into that vicious cycle and in the long run you probably want to be eating three stabilized meals per day you can still do a 12 14 or 16 hour fast like we do in our practice some people do 12. some do 14 some do 16. reason why some people do 12 is those people are having more of a tendency to low blood sugar i have a more tendency a bigger tendency towards low blood sugar in the morning so when i wear a continuous glucose monitor blood sugar's stable looks good all day okay a little bit up after meal then it comes back down we look at it it's normal overnight it's normal when i wake up and then about a half hour to an hour after i wake up my blood sugar drops into the 60s sometimes high 50s low 60s interesting okay so what are what's the best fast for me and again i can do this through science me it's about 13 hours to 14 hours maximum some days it's a little lower some days not but if you see it dropping into the 60s again if you're wearing a continuous glucose monitor you could say okay it's now time to eat because it makes sense like how low in blood sugar do you want to go because how much really you're asking yourself do i want to stress out my nervous system because if you're dropping that low in blood sugar it is a neurological stress from the body there's no doubt about it your body needs to then uh compensate in many ways so that you don't pass out i mean that it's it's a this is a real occurrence the adrenals have to kick in the thyroid's gonna decrease uh the pancreas needs to work the liver needs to work so nothing is free in this this life that's just not how it works so what i wanted to share with you is that again most people can uh maintain healthy blood sugar with three meals per day some people do well with four meals a day almost no one as an adult needs to do meal snack meal snack meal people that are on bodybuilding programs routines it's kind of a different story we're not talking about that here today but i do have people in my practice that drop in blood sugar even after a good stable mail after about four hours or so four and a half hours and so what i do with them is i do a breakfast i do a lunch it's a little on the earlier side it might be around 11 30 so we might do we might do somewhere around like 8 11 30 and then 3 30 might be a shake and then uh dinner's gonna be maybe at like 6 6 30 at the latest and then those people seem to do fine like they just spread everything out and they seem to do fine even overnight and they can still get in that 12 13 plus hour fast because they can stop eating around 6 30 and then they can go until 6 30 7 30 the next day so there are different ways of doing this and again even those people over time they can better stabilize their blood sugar and then not have to do that so like for example i used to not be able to stabilize my blood sugar now on mondays i do three out of four mondays a month i do a 24 hour fast and if you've never heard um my show on weekly fast monthly fast quarterly fast and how you can kind of play with them a little bit we and not play with them but actually use science to get the most out of autophagy body transformation overall health i will link that up here today i could go on and on what i'm gonna do is keep that at today and link up a bunch of shows for more information so head on over to stephencabral.com forward slash 2160 four shows on continuous glucose monitors using a glucometer i'll add the links there as well um different types of fasting one day a week quarterly etc i'll link it all up there so thank you so much take care and of course please do feel free to share the show with anyone you believe it could serve [Music] you