Diabetics How To Lower COVID-19 Risks

Reduced Blood Sugar In Diabetics Improves COVID19 Outcomes <Research>.

The news has talked about how different comorbidities increase a person’s risk of serious complications and death from the new coronavirus. One of these risks that has been well established is diabetes.

An April 30th paper from cell.com finds that well controlled blood sugar in diabetes is strongly associated with better covid19 outcomes. The paper is a retrospective analysis of 7,337 COVID-19 patients with or without diabetes.

Image credit from the referenced Cell Journal article, The image shows how big a difference blood sugar in diabetics made for covid19 survivability.

Well controlled blood sugar in diabetics resulted in a 1.1% covid 19 fatality rate. Poorly controlled blood sugar in diabetics results in an 11% fatality rate. This is a 10 X greater risk of death from covid19.

This is why the public health message everyone needs to hear during the coronavirus pandemic is that we need to improve our health. One of the items at the top of the list is blood sugar and insulin levels.

Improving Blood Sugar

The challenging thing about blood sugar is that often we’re led to believe we can fix it by simply taking medication. Although you may need medication for the problem you have right now… You also must change some important and often confusing lifestyle habits in order to really improve your health.

Improving blood sugar is not best handled by eating a diet that spikes blood sugar too high and then covering the spikes with more medications.

Truly improving health requires some challenging work on changing and improving habits.

An exceptionally strong case can be made for improving health and blood sugar through diet and daily exercise with some other lifestyle factors thrown in… sleep and stress reduction (give up all the media coverage!!).

What should someone eat that wants to lower blood sugar?

The better question might be what you should not eat.

Quit eating all the blood sugar spiking foods notably added sugar, juices, soft drinks, sweet tea, and everything made out of grains with a strong, well supported further recommendation of cutting out all ‘vegetable‘ oils.

It should also be noted eating too much fruit or even root vegetables can be a problem for some people with blood sugar problems.

Many people with higher blood sugar may have to also address other problems beyond diet to improve their blood sugar.

Diabetics each have different needs. Any changes in diet have to be carefully monitored for changes in blood sugar and other measurements.

Wrapping it up… Changing lifestyle habits is tough at first, but like all habits over time they become part of our routine and much easier.

Association of Blood Glucose Control and Outcomes in Patients with COVID-19 and Pre-existing Type 2 Diabetes. Lihua Zhu et al. Cell Metabolism Journal. Clinical and Translational Report| Volume 31, ISSUE 6, P1068-1077.e3, June 02, 2020
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-
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