For diabetics, it's crucial to identify low blood sugar levels. Learn the symptoms of and how to treat low blood sugar in this free video from a nutritionist specializing in diabetic diets.
Heidi Kaufman is a nutritionist that focuses on disorder prevention through diet. She gives lectures and teaches class at the local hospital about how to live with diabetes.
There are some real key symptoms of low blood sugar. One of them is feeling weak, shaky, a fast heart rate, faint. The person feels like they don't have enough energy, but they also feel panicky because the low blood sugar causes a rise in the hormone adrenaline. What adrenaline does; is it forces the liver to put sugar back in the bloodstream. So, the body's trying to rectify the problem by signaling this emergency reaction and that's what it feels like. It feels like an emergency. You feel compelled to get something to eat very quickly and generally quickly absorbed carbohydrate or sugar is the way to treat low blood sugar. We always tell people to keep with them some kind of quickly absorbed sugar. One can purchase glucose tablets at the drug store. Three of them will usually treat a mild low. Juices will bring the blood sugar up. Even, regular soft drinks are effective at doing that or hard candies; just keeping hard candies with you and whenever you get that feeling to take them and that will usually bring it up. Generally though we recommend that you follow that with eating some regular food so that the sugar doesn't drop again very quickly. Low blood sugar is usually a blood sugar that is under seventy. Now, some people who have diabetes have gotten so used to high blood sugars. Their blood sugars may normally be in the two hundreds; that when they are at 120, they feel low. Their body actually gives all the symptoms of a low blood sugar. And we generally recommend that even though they are in a normal range, they should probably treat it anyway with just a little bit of carbohydrate to take the edge off because otherwise that low blood sugar makes you feel very stressed out.
