What Causes Hypoglycemia?
Insulin Resistance
All that insulin makes it really difficult to keep your blood sugar steady. When the insulin resistance train has been accelerating on its track for a while, your body really isn't handling sugar properly anymore, and you will end up with an "abnormal sugar metabolism". One way an abnormal sugar metabolism will show up is in chronic hypoglycemia.
Processing sugar is hard work. Eating a donut or a cookie or a granola bar causes a blood sugar spike that the pancreas must deal with. Every spike requires the release of insulin to get it back under control. If we eat a lot of refined foods containing a lot of sugar, we start to live on the blood sugar roller coaster and we have a lot of insulin in our bodies most of the time. Abnormal sugar handling, over time, causes increased insulin resistance.
We know that a high level of sugar in the blood is bad. That's why diabetics stop eating sweets and take medication. A high level of insulin is also bad, but more insidious.
Insulin is not meant to sit around in the body all the time, and excess insulin causes a host of problems. For one thing, insulin is a storage hormone, so if you have too much insulin floating around, you will gain weight because excess sugar is stored as fat. Excess weight is a major risk factor for diabetes, and so is overworking the pancreas by producing too much insulin.
In early Type II diabetes, the pancreas is working very hard to keep up with the demand. Insulin levels in the body are abnormally high, and your blood sugar may be alternating between high and low. This leads to full-blown diabetes when the over-worked pancreas simply can't produce the amounts of insulin needed to overcome the insulin resistance of the body's cells. This slide into Type II diabetes is much more likely in people who are significantly overweight. 65% of people living with diabetes will die of a heart attack or stroke.
In addition to Type II diabetes, insulin resistance can cause an increase in blood pressure, "bad" cholesterol and tryglycerides. Dr. Gerald Reaven first recognized that these problems are linked in the late 1980s. He coined the term Syndrome X because no one knew at the time how these problems were linked or what caused them. But it's as clear now as it was then- this combination is a heart attack waiting to happen!
In his book, Syndrome X, Dr. Reaven states that Syndrome X "may be the cause of 50% of all heart attacks". Syndrome X is also sometimes called the Metabolic Syndrome, the Dysmetabolic Syndrome and the Insulin Resistance Syndrome. Another source suggests that Insulin Resistance Syndrome "affects between 60-75 million Americans". More recently, experts have also come to believe that Syndrome X (Insulin Resistance Syndrome) also increases the risk of cancer.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, so please don't use these articles to diagnose yourself. They are only intended to provide information.