What if blood sugar levels are a big lie?

You could argue the same about blood pressure. For decades, 140/90 was considered normal with the systolic number increasing with age (100 plus your age).

All of these numbers are driven by an agenda and yes, it is without doubt influenced by pharma and money.

They are always moving the goalposts, and not just for the blood sugar cut off points, blood pressure, and cholesterol. The normal kidney and liver function tests have had goal posts changed. When I was first diagnosed, the eGFR standard was over 60. Now it is over 90. There are others.

hm....... I am not that suspicious , the problem is sooner that before the societies did little to help people and people should be really ill before they got any help at all, both concerning physical and mental diseases... Now we more or less all demand a life quality where we can feel fine and have a capasity to enjoy life as well and our societies are build in a way that all people have access to health care... in earlier days many people suffered most of their lives without any possibillity to get help and also without any income that could pay for medical help anyway... and besides it was very limitied what doctors were able to cure..

our lifestyle have changed the whole picture of what people do suffer from and a lot is self inflicted maybe .....but I am still thankfull that scientist try to find cures to all the bad people can suffer from, and I do not consider scientists my enemy in general not even when big-pharma is behind... of cause there could be evil minds behind in some cases... and in some strategies to earn money on peoples suffering... I guess thats why somebody found that doctors had to swear not to have personal gain in their job to heal and cure their patients..

Yes, there are pharmas involved for their profits now but life expectancy was less before and now it has lengthed (for those born before 1960).

Can you really judge all lowwring of bloods on whats happened with cholesterol and statins etc??

Personally I just think medicine and illness is still in early days... the real research only comes out on real people, not mice or beagles..

The only way to really have any impact on meds etc is to give feedback to MHRA but patients and NHS staff dont bother.

Very few people ever report anything. All those that have had metformin aide effects?? I bet less than 1% have informed MHRA.

The patients are just as much to blame for wanting drugs and operations etc...

As for blood levels for any diabetes. I just think that a truer average is now available with more blood strips etc nowadays byt nit convinced on pro's or con's on whats right or wrong...

yes we could make a common preasure group of hundres of thousands of diabetics... maybe even millions and have much more to say in the treatment of diabetics.. It could be a union of diabetics doing Low Carbing

grant12888 said:

First of all I have type 2 and are not medically trained

I have been doing a lot of research lately and found that heart attacks are caused by many things of which cholesterol levels are not one of them. furthermore it appears when a high cholesterol is determined by supposed experts who are virtually all on the payroll of the drug companies. The lower level thay get it to the more people who are eligable for thier evil Statins. Now you may or may not agree with this however I don't wish to talk about Cholesterol now I want to talk about blood sugar.

So lets say if cholesterol is a big con by the drug companies then maybe blood sugar levels could also be the same. We are all individuals and perhaps for you a healthy BG level is 4 to 6.5 and for another person it is 6 to 8 and for me it is 7 to 9 for example.

I found this on the internet - 'before 1997 you where diabetic if fasting BG was more than 140 then it decreased to 126 which made 14% of the world now diabetic needing drug companies products In 2003 it was lowered to 100 which meant 60% of the Indian population was now diabetic and needing drugs. And do you know who are the members of those panels deciding fasting sugar limits? They are the consultants of the 7 biggest pharaceutical companies in the world. Hence it is the pharmaceutical companies that decide if you are a diabetic or not???

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....... or it could be that science has shown the limits are not fit for purpose. When I was a QC jock for a pharma related company we were for ever reviewing run data and moving our upper and lower limits.... it's how science works.

Whether, in this case, Big Pharma have been doing to catch more clients... I really don't care. I am a T2 and want to keep my BGs as low as possible as I remember the months before I was diagnosed.... and they were not great.

PS: how reliable is the internet as source of information? Peer review may have it's faults but it beats a lot stuff flying around out there.

Yep it's a mine field the lot of it! Frustrating as hell, different opinions every where on diet, diabetes, cholesterol!

We have to try to inform ourselves and find doctors we trust who are not closed minded. It's not easy, but when it comes to food, no one can argue against real foods that have existed for centuries like fresh meat, fish , eggs etc... I think also plant foods and of course preparing these foods ourselves! Anything else is just fake food!

On Cholesterol I agree with the OP from what I have read also, but I don't agree on the blood sugars. I do believe there is a normal range and that's <5 mmol/l. I have trust in Dr. Bernstein and often talks about how he came up with the correct bs target of 4.5mmol/l through testing on non diabetics. Apparently the non diabetic numbers always showed up in the 4.5mmol/ range. Also I have seen HbA1C results of family members who are non diabetic and they are in the 4's. Also, if my own bs is not between 4-5.5 I can feel a difference so I do believe that all diabetics should strive for numbers close to non diabetics for a better day to day life and to avoid long term complications. That's just my opinion.

I can't comment on the numbers. But my experience is saying that high BG is bad. Since bringing my numbers down various things I didn't realise were actually a problem have improved.

[QUOTE="grant12888]

A doctor has to act on what is in your best interest and inline with current guide lines. Perhaps I'm saying What if the current guidelines are wrong? are people being harmed?[/QUOTE]

I agree with your views on the cholesterol controversy. I also agree that treatment of Type 2 diabetes has been out of step with how one's body works. However, blood glucose levels are a different matter. If you are a type 2 diabetic, and you are not on insulin or a medicine that makes your pancreas release insulin, then it is not possible for you to have blood sugars that are too low (although it is possible to have blood sugars that feel too low if your body is not used to being there). If you eat and exercise in such a way that your blood sugars go down, they will, at worst, be normal.

I was diagnosed in 1085 so my generation was really the first for Type 2 to strike young people. When I was a boy, Type 2 diabetes was called "Adult onset diabetes" because it mainly hit old people. There weren't many standards for what a normal blood sugar was because that wasn't how you treated Type 1 diabetics. The need for more knowledge about normal levels grew as the diabetes problem did. Before the discovery of insulin, diabetes was treated with a low-carb diet. By the time Type 2 became the problem that it is now, doctors had forgotten that. They were used to treating diabetes with insulin and that is what confounded their approach.

It is also not true that all doctors insist that you be on medicines to lower blood sugars in all cases. My doctor completely understands the LCHF approach to diabetes management and supports it.

If you have a healthy friend who is "normal" weight, ask them if you can test their blood sugar after a meal. My wife's blood sugar is rarely over 110 an hour after a meal no matter what she eats.

grant12888 said:

Let me throw a couple of other things into the mix. I exclude myself but I rekon there are tens of thousands of people out there who are diagnosed as diabetic when they are not and just have the correct BG for thier bodies. Hence, they are pumping themselves full of drugs and like me have to renew the drivers license every 3 years.

Another point is your wonderful government tells you to eat a balanced diet. If you look at that diet with its cereals, carbs and fruit etc it has been worked out that it contains 72 tea spoons of sugar. 72 a day for a diabetic! It has been created by the food industry to sell you all thier low fat no fat **** products and by the drug companies who want to keep you sick so you need thier drugs.

Please don't think that these drug company scientist have your interests at heart we are all being conned

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hmmm you exclude yourself and then, like me, you include yourself... to be needing to renew every 3 years sounds as like quite a lot...

and if it my government, you use the word your, which suggests it's not yours... it's a given position for a lot of folk on this forum that the balanced diet is not for them as they follow a LCHF diet...

Food companies make what they think people will buy. For a long time low fat was thought to be a good thing... it seems now it might not be... and they may change.

I'll leave the scientist line alone.....

Statins are a con with millions of people taking them unnecessarily. However, high blood sugar is a reality that diabetes suffers need to address. It turns out that most people can treat type 2 diabetes with a LCHF diet and intermittent fasting. Fasting does have amazing benefits, but because no drugs company is making money out of it there are no funded clinical trials for its benefits.

The medical profession seems to have got it seriously wrong by promoting low fat, high carb diets and this has led to an epidemic of obese people and a surge of type 2 diabetes since the 1980s. It is going to take some time to get the LCHF message across. In the meantime the diet advice many health professions are giving will worsen the symptoms of diabetes.

pretty sure we all owe our lives here to Technology. Diabetes would not be cured if we didnt have technology. All doctors have an agenda and are curropt which is why I ended up with T2. But I also think sometimes they bluff.

Reading articles like the following makes me increasingly cynical about "science" - it's being as compromised by money and conflicts of interest as just about everything else on this planet:

http://fullmeasure.news/news/cover-story/fake-science

There may be some merit in the OP. However, I know that when I was diagnosed T2 by my GP I was peeing a lot and consistently thirsty. Now my BG levels are lower (due to lifestyle changes only) these symptoms have gone.

And another article on poor medical science:

http://nypost.com/2017/05/06/medical-studies-are-almost-always-bogus/

Indy51 said:

Reading articles like the following makes me increasingly cynical about "science" - it's being as compromised by money and conflicts of interest as just about everything else on this planet:

http://fullmeasure.news/news/cover-story/fake-science

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As the saying goes, the answer to 'bad science' is not 'no science' but 'better science'. Fortunately there are people who are expert at interpreting published studies and can see where some of the biases lie. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to do this. One problem in medicine is that pharmaceutical companies may choose not to publish 'negative' results - this gives the impression that a drug is more effective than it really is. Another is to measure large numbers of parameters during the study so that, by chance, one of the parameters seems to improve with the drug - by omitting the list of all the parameters measured it makes it difficult to see that this was likely to be just due to chance.

One way round these problems is to insist that only the results from registered trials can be published and that all the parameters being measured also have to be registered in advance. In this way, results of all trials are seen, not just the ones that show the drug in a positive light.

If you're interested in improving the quality of the information available from clinical trials, you might like to sign this international AllTrials petition to get all clinical trials published http://www.alltrials.net/petition/

Dark Horse said:

As the saying goes, the answer to 'bad science' is not 'no science' but 'better science'. Fortunately there are people who are expert at interpreting published studies and can see where some of the biases lie. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to do this. One problem in medicine is that pharmaceutical companies may choose not to publish 'negative' results - this gives the impression that a drug is more effective than it really is. Another is to measure large numbers of parameters during the study so that, by chance, one of the parameters seems to improve with the drug - by omitting the list of all the parameters measured it makes it difficult to see that this was likely to be just due to chance.

One way round these problems is to insist that only the results from registered trials can be published and that all the parameters being measured also have to be registered in advance. In this way, results of all trials are seen, not just the ones that show the drug in a positive light.

If you're interested in improving the quality of the information available from clinical trials, you might like to sign this international AllTrials petition to get all clinical trials published http://www.alltrials.net/petition/

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AllTrials has these recommendations for members of patient groups:-

1. Actively campaign to get all clinical trials registered and reported.
2. Nominate AllTrials ambassadors to raise awareness among your members and other groups you interact with.
3. Develop a plan for monitoring ongoing registered trials in your area for missing trial results, and for following up on those cases.
4. Identify the drug companies most relevant to your disease area and write to them, asking them to confirm that they have registered all trials and reported full results for that area. Post their responses on your website and tweet them out using #AllTrials.
5. Regularly bring up the topic in your interactions with pharma companies, regulators, policy makers and the media.