Balancing Low Blood Sugars

Are you feeling low in sugars or feel hungry even though you just ate 1 hr ago? Do you get hangry without a good reason? Find out whether it's the liver, pancreas, or thyroid causing your bioenergetic circuit dysfunction and how to get rid of those feelings of low blood sugar.

1:15 - Cortisol relationship with Low Blood Sugars
3:50 - Bioenergetic Circuit in the NeuroEndoMetabolic Stress Response
6:25 - Downward Spiral of Low Sugars and how it affects your other organs
9:25 - Pancreatic function in regulating blood sugars
11:10 - Bioenergetic Circuit Dysfunction - Diabetes, Mitochondrial Dysfunction, Thyroid function

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Transcript

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 0:06

Are you feeling low in sugars or feel hungry even though you just ate one hour ago? Do you feel like you get hangry without any good reason? This is The Dr. Lam Show. We're here to talk about integrative medicine and empower you to take control of your health. Make sure you like and subscribe to The Dr. Lam Show podcast and the YouTube channel as a way to get the show more visible and show other people who really need this information. I'm Dr. Carrie Lam, a family medicine physician and I've completed fellowships in functional and metabolic medicine. I'm passionate about nutrition and lifestyle medicine.

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 0:41

I'm Dr. Jeremy Lam. I'm an internal medicine doctor. I'm also board certified in anti aging and regenerative medicine. I spent my medical career working in chronic disease treatment and prevention. I believe firmly in the power of integrative medicine. Today we're going to be talking about balancing your sugars. To start with let's talk about what blood sugar imbalance is, so we're all on the same page. One of the most common symptoms that we find in people complaining of adrenal fatigue is that they need to eat frequently. They just don't feel good and feel irritable, you know, 30 minutes to two hours after a meal when they're supposed to feel full. So what's this all about Dr. Carrie?

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 1:25

Well, sometimes what they're feeling is this unbalanced blood sugar. Cortisol is very closely related to your metabolism so when you're caught up, cortisol levels drop. When you have adrenal fatigue, you're feeling low, your sugars are also going to go up and down very radically because you're feeling irritated after you eat, or if you don't eat. The short term solution is just to eat more frequently, whether it's every two hours or, every one hour, so you can manually try to stabilize his blood sugar, as your body's not really able to do it at that point. However, there is a problem with that, when you feel it has helped you to stabilize those feelings of feeling low sugars. The more you eat, the more you can gain weight in the future. So this could be undesirable in many situations for people as they don't want to gain weight. Hence, even though you're stabilizing the short term blood sugar, to be in more line with your adrenals, and your body's needs, you might end up gaining more weight. So we have to really use this opportunity again to look at what are the causes and what your body's trying to tell you. What is the body trying to tell us when you have low blood sugars Dr. Jeremy?

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 2:41

It's trying to tell us that your body needs more energy and higher sugar levels to sustain the stress that you're fighting off. When your body is craving sugar and experiencing these lows, it's important to keep your blood sugar maintained to fight off the stress. As you can tell, balancing blood sugars isn't as simple as just eating more or less and then going on with your life. Every circuit and organ in your body is connected. So a major change in one of them can have numerous and unexpected effects. If you're struggling with blood sugar issues, or any other changes in your body that you're not familiar with, then contact our team for a free initial phone call at 714-709-8000. They can give you specialized information and help with the changes due to blood sugar imbalances. Now we're going to go more deeply into some of the issues regarding the bioenergetic circuit and some health problems. Dr. Carrie, do you want to tell us about the bioenergetic circuit?

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 3:52

Yeah, the bioenergetic circuit is important because the bouncing of the blood sugars actually goes into this circuit, which is part of the neuro endo metabolic stress response. The bioenergetic circuit has three organ systems, the thyroid, the pancreas, and the liver. And these three are all important in metabolic functions. One of their primary functions is to produce energy needed by every cell in the body, to carry out its functions. When things go wrong with a bioenergetic circuit, it can lead to this downward spiral affecting every other system in the body. And even when the blood sugars go down, if you send your blood to the lab, you might actually find that your sugar's are not low. Often, the absolute value in the lab is high, when people have this feeling of hunger and needing to eat again, even though their actual blood sugars are low. So we want to make sure you have this picture in mind that, when we're talking about low blood sugars, we're talking more, about the response that you're having to the cortisol, rather than an actual level of the blood sugar dropping. And so, a lot of times, what are some of the causes of blood sugars feeling low, can be from eating a very high carb meal, and therefore you spike your insulin too quickly. And insulin brings all the glucose into your cells, and therefore, you feel the drop in the sugar much faster. This drop might not necessarily make the sugar go low, but it could just be a relative drop where you feel the low blood sugar. What you can do to mitigate this, is avoiding high carb meals, adding more protein and good fat with the carbs, and eating often, as far as the blood sugars are concerned. Let's get back to the bioenergetics, and how we can improve the whole circuit in order to help those reactive hypoglycemic symptoms. So, Dr. Jeremy, what does this downward spiral of bioenergetic circuit look like?

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 6:26

When stress causes derangement, and you have bioenergetic dysfunction, then the resulting symptoms only worsen until the underlying problem or stress is resolved. You can have paradoxical reactions, repeated adrenal crashes, severe constipation, sensitivity to supplements and medications. Regardless of which pathways are involved, the derangement of your metabolic functioning, and the energetic circuit is a huge part of the downward spiral that comes with adrenal fatigue. And so unfortunately, by the time these metabolic symptoms emerge, your body is already compromised, and it can't handle stress well. You get symptoms such as reactive hypoglycemia, gastric shutdown, and low blood pressure and all these indicate that the body's going into a catabolic state in order to conserve the remaining energy that you need, to fight off the stress.

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 7:39

And how does hyperglycemia get implicated in the bioenergetic circuit? As discussed before. adrenal fatigue sufferers commonly have hypoglycemia due to decreased cortisol and increased insulin. And normally with increasing stress, you usually would have more cortisol and increased glucose to be released into the body. However, when you are under stress, cortisol somehow decreases and glucose release slows down. So, when you increase insulin to counter the initial higher levels of glucose, then that stress can lead to hypoglycemia, because a lot of the glucose goes into your cells and not into the blood. So the hypoglycemia can be subclinical, that even a trained medical professionals can miss, this connection between stress and hyperglycemia. And so it can be very disruptive because your body cannot obtain sufficient energy from food converted into sugar. Then your body starts to burn fat and protein for energy, which is a very inefficient way of providing energy. Cortisol levels must be high enough to supply high energy. So when you have adrenal fatigue, and your cortisol levels decrease with stress, then your body will lack the energy required to function well. And low blood sugars can definitely affect your brain more when it senses these low levels. It stimulates different organs to release hormones into the bloodstream, in order to make your liver release more glucose. If that doesn't work, then it may cause seizures, confusion, loss of consciousness, brain fog. Dr. Jeremy tell us how the pancreas is implicated in this bioenergetic circuit?

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 9:33

The pancreas is an organ of digestion and its primary purpose is to help control insulin levels. Also, enzymes from the pancreas help with breaking down foods in the intestines. So with significant stress, inflammation results. Chronic inflammation can negatively affect the cells in the pancreas, making it much more difficult. For the pancreas to regulate blood sugar levels and in reactive hypoglycemia as well. So if you have problems with your bioenergetic circuits, then it's important to know how it's affecting other symptoms in your body. The symptoms of dysfunctional bioenergetic circuits include catabolic state also, is dizziness, which is a common complaint brought to medical professionals. Low blood sugar can also be often a cause of dizziness. So that can be related to thyroid problems, and low blood pressure can also be related to dizziness. You can have cholesterol imbalance, and dyslipidemia as well. Abnormal lipid metabolism, occurs due to abnormal levels of fats accumulated in the blood. So you can have significant health problems that may include the cardiovascular system. What are the symptoms of bioenergetic dysfunction, Dr. Carrie?

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 11:07

You can also see insulin resistance, which sometimes leads to Type two diabetes and cardiovascular conditions with the inability of the glucose to get into the cells, you have higher levels of glucose in the blood. Other things that you might see are mitochondrial disorders, which lead to insufficient energy production. The mitochondria are super important energy factories in the cell that produce ATP needed by every cell in your body. They are very sensitive, especially to thyroid hormones, which are also connected with adrenal hormones. So you definitely want to make sure your thyroid is working well for the bio and energetic circuit to prevent it from becoming dysfunctional. And sugar cravings from the hypoglycemia could also be another symptom as well as tinnitus, or ringing in your ears. So, the blood sugar levels might be causing all these symptoms as well as weight gain and inability to lose weight. If you are in catabolic state, like Dr. Jeremy talked about, there would be muscle loss and losing of weight that was uncontrolled. And if you're there, you definitely need to find out why. And so, an illustration of the model of the organs that make up that bioenergetic circuit is the liver, the pancreas, the thyroid, they all play major roles in the metabolic function, and how energy is distributed throughout the body. It's metabolically dysfunctional, and you could have the symptoms of hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar. Healing this bioenergetic circuit is possible, but you need to have a comprehensive plan that takes into account how these organs work together with the whole neuro endo metabolic stress response. We hope this helps you understand what may be going on in your body, as blood sugar imbalances can often be ignored by conventional medicine, leading to long term poor health. So remember that it's your body and you're the best judge of whether you're healthy or not. If you think something's wrong, raise the flag. Don't stop searching until you get the help and guidance you need. Thank you for being ere with us today on The Dr. Lam Show. We hope you find his information helpful. And s if you did, please subscribe to our channel so we can continu to bring you more content. L ke, subscribe and ring the bell for the notifications. If you now anyone else who might find his show helpful just share it ith them. Remember that we're ere to empower you to take con rol of your hea

Unknown: 14:13

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