HYPOGLYCAEMIA

Welcome to www.nutritionhelp.com.

Did you know that hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar) can often be helped by Nutritional Therapy? In my clinical practice, I have seen it happen time and time again - and now you can receive tailor-made advice online from www.nutritionhelp.com!

My name is Erica White. I’m Nutritional Director of Nutritionhelp, and also a Fellow of the Institute for Optimum Nutrition and an Honorary Fellow of the British Association for Applied Nutrition and Nutritional Therapy. I have now retired from clinical practice, but we have set up an online Questionnaire and Report system which can give you all the advice you need, with an optional facility to have contact with one of our associate team of qualified Nutritionists.

I’m going to answer a few questions about hypoglycaemia which I hope might be helpful to you.

Q. Erica, what exactly is hypoglycaemia?

It’s a formal name for low blood sugar.

Q. How does it affect people?

It’s mostly experienced as a yo-yo effect in energy levels. Let me describe a typical day. In the morning, you find it hard to get going until you have a stimulating cup of tea or coffee. By eleven o’clock your energy flags and you are more than ready for “a little something” – probably another cup of coffee and perhaps a biscuit or a doughnut. After that, you feel more on top of things and can cope until lunchtime, but by then you certainly need another coffee or perhaps a cola drink with your sandwich and chocolate snack-bar. The afternoon is increasingly difficult so that tea and biscuits are essential to get you through the rest of the day - and by evening you feel so drained that not even dinner, dessert and a couple more cups of coffee can restore your energy, so you slump in front of the TV, sleeping through most of the programmes, until you crawl into bed for a restless night’s sleep. Then the new day dawns, and you start again with a mug of tea or coffee. As the weeks and months go by, your energy slumps become more and more frequent and steadily worse. I’ve drawn that picture for a great many people who nod their heads in agreement as though I’m describing their own situation! It’s a very, very common picture.

Q. But that’s not living! That’s just existing! It surely can’t be right! What’s going on?

I quite agree! Let me explain. Sugar in the blood provides energy to all the cells in the body, including the brain. When sugar levels are too low, you might experience fatigue, irritability, aggression, nervousness, depression, crying spells, dizziness, fear, anxiety, panic, confusion, forgetfulness, inability to concentrate, insomnia, headaches, palpitations, sweating, muscle pains or digestive problems. Quite a list!

Q. What causes sugar levels to drop too low? Doesn’t everyone eat too much sugar these days? That would surely make blood sugar levels be high?

You’re right about our sugar-intake. The average person today eats more than his own body-weight in sugar every single year! But strange as it may seem, eating too much sugar can lead to sugar-levels in your blood falling too low. Imagine a graph drawn on a page. Every time you eat some sugary foods or refined grains like white flour or white rice, or whenever you have stimulants like tea or coffee or chocolate, the level of sugar in your blood is quickly increased and the line on the graph shoots up to a high point. If it stayed there, you would have diabetes, so a message is sent to the pancreas to release some insulin, which makes your blood-sugar drop - and the line on the graph plummets down. That’s when you feel your worst, so you grab a cup of tea or coffee or eat a bar of chocolate to give yourself a lift – and the line on the graph goes up. The symptoms pass and you feel better - but not for long, because of course the stimulants or the sugar you have eaten will actually cause a message to be sent again to the pancreas, so out comes the insulin, down goes the blood-sugar with another drop down on the graph - and so the day goes on. Energy levels and symptoms swing up and down until, by evening, it is virtually impossible to achieve a balance and you end up feeling totally exhausted. If this situation continues, eventually the pancreas becomes so weakened by over-work that it stops producing insulin and then there is no way of bringing blood-sugar down; diabetes has set in! Fortunately, something can be done to prevent this happening before this stage is reached, provided you catch it in time.

Q. So what exactly needs to be done?

You need to change the line on the graph from peaks and troughs to a gentle, undulating curve of slight ups and downs. You do this by eating the right sort of food at the right intervals. You also need to take supplements, especially Vitamin B3 and Chromium, both of which help the liver to release Glucose Tolerance Factor. Other nutritional supplements are helpful for supporting the adrenal glands while things get back to normal - which they can!

Q. So can the situation really be reversed?

Well, I did it myself and so have many others! In my thirties, when I had all sorts of health problems, one of them was fatigue. By late afternoon each day I was slumped in a chair, with no energy to get the family’s tea or even talk to them. We eventually discovered that if I ate some food, after half-an-hour I would feel energy begin to flow into my body, and I would then have just enough strength to put the children to bed and read them a story.

But - I’m now in my seventies, and my blood-sugar levels are so well-balanced and stable that my energy levels and stamina are amazingly constant! This is because I discovered what changes I needed to make to my diet, and what supplements could help to stabilise my blood-sugar control.

Q. So what would you say to someone who has been diagnosed with hypoglycaemia? Or to someone who suffers from energy slumps all through the day and wonders what is wrong with them?

If you haven’t considered it before, you may well find that appropriate Nutritional Therapy could be very helpful. Of course, we can make no claims for you as an individual, but we can say that many people have seen significant improvement – as I did myself.

Maybe you would like to register for an online report from www.nutritionhelp.com. A detailed Questionnaire enables you to be provided with personalised advice based on my clinical experience over nearly twenty years. In addition, it will tell you about various optional supplements which can help to relieve your symptoms while you are tackling the root cause.

For just £47 you will receive an extremely detailed report giving tailor-made nutritional advice to help you on your road to recovery. Read how the system works on www.nutritionhelp.com/quest_more.php.

Register now for an online Questionnaire on www.nutritionhelp.com.

I wish you well!

Erica White, Dip.ION, FBANT
Nutritional Director, Nutritionhelp Ltd