carbs (again)

[Marmite]

Please forgive if another silly question but I am learning. Does the amount of sugar in the blood change all the time ? I note different foods give varying amounts of carbs/calories. Surely with exercise we burn off excess and a few hours after eating our sugar content will be less than immediately after the meal. IF this is correct then the blood test results could be misleading.

 

[grovesy]

Yes it does vary, and even within minutes. It can climb after a meal and fall again a couple of hours later. Exercise is a strange one sometimes it falls, and sometimes it goes up then comes down later. Though it can have a knock on effect the for the next day.

 

[Drummer]

The blood tests indicate trends - if you always do the before and two hours later tests over time you can see if you are keeping your levels down, and if there are improvements. Once I got my after dinner levels below 8 I kept to the same meals, but saw the numbers dropping bit by bit, so I knew I was not overdoing the carbs and my ability to cope with them was improving. It isn't so much the daily changes as the weekly trends we need to study.

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

Please forgive if another silly question but I am learning. Does the amount of sugar in the blood change all the time ? I note different foods give varying amounts of carbs/calories. Surely with exercise we burn off excess and a few hours after eating our sugar content will be less than immediately after the meal. IF this is correct then the blood test results could be misleading.

Not a silly question at all @Marmite, and yes, BG does fluctuate in response to different things during the day...

Activity, food, stress, excitement, hormones, alcohol... all have an effect.

Two big drivers of BG change are exercise/activity and carbohydrates in food. So you are right, it’s important to understand BG results in the context of mealtimes, and it’s one of the reasons why members here find pairs of ‘before’ and ‘2 hours after’ checks very helpful. Keeping those meal rises as small as you can by adjusting the carb content of meals will really help.