As a wee rant
I do not see the point of having a meter that measures my blood sugar
and having reports from the diabetic nurse that use HBA1c or measure HBA1c or whatever it is that they do with it
my meter readings in the morning are usually 10 give a take a little usually a tad lower if I've consumed nothing after about 22:00-22:30
is it reasonable of me to assume that is my normal level
the nurse wants me to get it down
and then wants me to worry about checking its over 5 if I'm riding my motorbike
I have never had reading under 5 ... if I fast it goes up
I can generally tell if my reading would be high because I get thirsty and my urine can smell even taste sweet
what gets those readings up... eating too much of stuff I should not.. I generally avoid that stuff but completely
BTW what is a doctor are there still any around?
They all seem to disappear around the same time as the onset of covid the best you get is a phone call
What they pay these people for doing not a lot I reckon the NHS should get some of its money back
Hi phil68 and welcome to the forums. I'm assuming you're Type 2 - if not, my apologies. Also no idea if you're on any medication. You can add this info to your profile and it helpd people answer.
I agree with you in one respect. There is no point in testing your blood either through fingerpricking or HbA1c if you're going to do nothing with the information you get. The fact that you're on here asking the question suggests that you're not actually saying that, more asking what it can be useful for.
The HbA1c is a kind of rough average going back around three months. It doesn't measure blood sugar directly, but counts the number of red blood cells that at some point have had a glucose molecule attached to them (they call this "glycated"). It's three months because that's how long (give or take) red blood cells live, and it's a bit skewed towrds recent weeks. It does give you a picture of how your blood glucose has been recently. Different countries have different views on what "normal" blood glucose is butin the UK it is within the range 38-42 mmol/mol. It's accepted as "normal" because about 95% of non-diabetic adults have a blood glucose somewhere inside that range. (graph attached below)
Fingerprick tests measure your blood glucose (in mmol/litre, not the same units as the HbA1c measurement) directly at the point you test. One test won't tell you whether you BG level is rising or falling or staying still. Everyone (diabetics and non-diabetics) will see variations in their BG all day, every day, in response to what you eat, stress, exercise, illness, ambient temperature, time of day etc. For most people most of the time what's been eaten is the single biggest factor. There's not a direct read-across from the fingerprick tests to the HbA1c, becasue they test different things in different ways, but the figerprick should show you direction of travel. The second graphic might help.
Testing will show you which foods raise your blood glucose and by how much - the usual method is to test before eating and then two hours later. The idea is that at the two hour mark your blood glucose will have risen in response to the carbs eaten being digested, but your insulin response (which moves the glucose out of the blood into muscle cells for use as energy) should have brought it back down to around where you started off. The normal advice is that you should be a) within 2 mmol/litre of where you started off, and b) not above 7.9mmol/litre.
If it's not, that demonstrates that there were too many carbs in the food for your body to handle properly, which means that the glucose hangs around in your bloodstream or gets converted to fat.
Neither of these is good. High blood glucose levels over time do physical damage to nerves and small blood vessels. This can result in a number of painful and unpleasant symptoms (I've had some of that and I don't want them back).
The other thing is that our livers hold a store that can be converted to glucose really quickly. Many of us find that in the mornings our livers will dump loads of glucose into our blood, resulting in high morning readings without eating. This seems to have something to do with the liver getting used to high glucose in the blood and trying to keep them up. It can eventually be trained not to do it as much but my morning readings were the last to come down - it took a while.
Best of luck - it's really your call on what you do and how you choose to handle things. If you want your blood glucose down, many of us have found that a low carb diet works quickly and effectively. It did for me within weeks, and I've lost over 25kg since. But all of it is up to you. This forum is a good resource and people are generally very willing to provide advice based on their own experiences.
