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I am a nurse. I have to work with diabetics daily. Lots of them. Nursing homes load us with lots of patients (20-52 on days) and it is very common for doctors to routinely order blood sugar testing 4x /day. So we get a real good feel for what our people are going through.
Testing you blood sugar once a year is NOT going to tell you much. I suggest getting a handheld glucose monitor (those are cheap) and suck up the cost of the test strips (those are expensive), and take your blood sugar before breakfast and 1-2 hrs after every meal. In nursing school, we are told that normal fasting blood sugar is 70-120. This hasn't changed. But the labs still always insist that 100 is the highest it should go. We as nurses are always happy when our patients test below 130. It means we don't have to give a shot. (unless an individual is on a special program with their doc, but the shot then usually comes right before breakfast).
Normally, in the nursing home, we check blood sugars at fasting in the am (about 5, just to deal with the mass quantity of patients- often our patient load is above 60 on night shift) and get meds out- you don't need to check this early, just right before eating.
And then we check right before lunch and then before dinner and then at bedtime.
When I check myself, I may check more often just to get better understanding of what is happening. I do this on my day off, there is no time on workdays.
The A1C blood sugar check does NOT have to be taken fasting. Fasting is irrevelant. It checks factors that are not immediate. It basically is a way to see how "compliant" a patient has been about staying out of the candy and cookies over the last 3 months.
Soemthing that unfortuanately doctors and hospitals are not going to tell you, is that you can stabilize your blood suagr with PROTEIN! You need protein.
In spite of the common understanding that it is CARBOHYDRATES that raise the blood sugars and mess up the triglycerides, some, even professionals, still don't get it that protein and fats do not raise triglycerides (unless they are the polyunsaturates, sorry food faddists. ) And in fact strengthen the factors that keep blood suagrs stable. For much more info, see www.westonaprice.org, for the diets of the healthiest tribes that ever existed, and they ate a lot of fatty meats and saturated fats. Many ate NO carbs in any form. Those that ate carbs, they were always whole grain, and soaked and fermented so as to break down the phytic acid (which binds minerals and other factors bind protein making it unusable). There was NO heart disease and folks lived to ripe old ages, still active.
Get a copy of "Low Blood Sugar and You" By Carlton Fredericks, even though you are worried about high blood sugar because it will give you a much better understanding of how you created this to begin with. And how to get out of it. There are many doctors today who still don't seem to have a clue as to how to heal this condition through dietary means, or perhaps they are beholden to the slavery of their masters, the drug manufacturers. Many docs still insist hypoglycemia is a fake condition, and recommend sugar and candy to get it out of the temporary low. But they will never tell you (unless they are well researched and actually care) to focus on the protein foods.
Nurses in the trenches know from experience to try to discourage patients from carbs and encourage proteins, however, the hospital industry still constantly provides low protein and high carb snacks (even sugarless, but refined nonetheless, by the way Aspartame and Splenda increase diabetes risk). They know what to serve as healthy choices, but when the rubber meets the road, they still go cheap and unhealthy.
One thing I noticed about your food choices, oat bran and oranges, is that these are high carb and extremely low protein foods. They will jack your blood sugars around. If you have these WITH lots of protein, milk (whole milk), meat and eggs, it will modify the glycemic index of these carbs, and lower the danger.
Low fat milk is higher in sugars, lactose. Also, grass fed and organic milk is lower in lactose. It may be a stress response for the animal to increase the lactose in their milk when confined and not eating real pasture. There is not a darned thing wrong with butter and milk fats, Nutrition and Physacal Degeneration was the complete work of Weston Price and he gives ample ducumentation of his world wide study.
Out of 129 medical schools, 29 offer any sort of nutrition classes at all for docs. It is not a required course. If you ask a doctors to explain cellular respiration and the role of the vitamins and minerals in the metabolic pathway, he will not have a clue. It was something he sat through in anatomy and physiology and probably spent too much time drinking his buddies under the table and playing jokes on his roomate in college. So he won't remember many of the basics. Nutrition is a basic. The role of vitamins is exclusively to interlink with enzymes so that the enzymes will work. You need enzymes to do everything. If you ask the doc the difference between drugs and vitamins, he will say they are the same. But vitamins allow enzymes to function. Drugs block those very enzymes, stopping cellular work from occurring. So you get side effects, which are mimicry of deficiencies.
The whole triglyceride complex with HDL, LDL, VLDL, is largely still not understood by medical science. They think they understand, and invent statins, to block your triglyceride production, but they know that this does something very bad and they must check you liver enzymes frequently. Because it can make you go haywire and die of cancer. They know they can lower your triglycerides, but they also ignore that ultimately, the statins increase the overall death rate. There is something very important they are not understanding here. But instead of taking the hints, they are recommending people take statins as a "preventative" and in Euirope they will be offering statins along with a fast food meal to counteract the fat. And they are lowering the normal triglyceride standard so they can put more people on statins.
If you go back to the basics, you have to face that fats are very important. So important that the bile put out by the gall bladder is soaked back up and recycled in the small intestine (it is high in cholesterol)and sent back to the liver for reuse, and that fat absorbed in the intestine, is soaked up by the lymph system and unceremoniously dumped directly into the heart. I think the docs forget that. I was amazed when my physiology teacher told us this, and she insisted it was a horrible mistake of evolution. Oh? I think rather it was a hint.
Two items that really seem to cause diabetes/metabolic syndrome /inflammatory condtitions, without your knowledge, are MSG and fructose. Fructose, particularly high fructose corn syrup, is found hidden in multiple products. Fructose is sugar on steroids. It causes high triglycerides, enlarged heart, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, congestive heart failure, liver cirrhosis, and fatty liver disease. And gallstones. (a hint about cholesterol dysfunction). Read your ingredient lists! MSG is also hidden, and renamed to various things like "Spices" and "flavors"! Textured vegetable protien, Hydrolysed yeast product.
MSG rats prove that MSG causes permanent obesity.
MSG rats
Also look up www.msgtruth.com and
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2005/05/31/diabetes-disease.aspx
http://hubpages.com/hub/MSG-Fat-Rats-and-Us
http://www.msgtruth.org/diabetes.htm
HFCS
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2004/05/26/corn-syrup-diabetes.aspx
Fructose rats
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15853119
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17402291
http://ajpregu.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/298/5/R1343
http://www.atherosclerosis-journal.com/article/0021-9150%2889%2990031-2/abstract
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/
There are hundreds of fructose rats studies, just google fructose rats. There is no end to the research on them. Which tells me that the docs aren't noticing this research or they are ignoring it. The research is there.
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First let me say that Blood sugar should be tested two hours from the time you started eating. Oh I am diabetic type 2.Second alcohol will reduce blood sugar with one, maybe two drinks. eating a fruit like an orange is considered your entire carb allotment at any meal, so drink a glass of orange juice and thats it for carbs for your meal or eat something less, like 2 pieces of bread. I would suggest you sign up for the diabetes food course at your local hospital and learn all you can about what and what not to eat and counting carbs and safe blood sugars. You are suppose to be under 100 when you first test in the am before eating or drinking anything. If not, then you need to be on diabetic meds. period. I was skinny most of my life and always had high triglycerides and cholesterol. I was finally diagnosed as a type 4 hyperlipidemia but not diabetic back in the 80's, until 2 years ago in March. I am now 65.
So me thinks you are fooling yourself with your own food and blood testing. The best way to find out if you really are a diabetic, is an A1C test which requires you fast before blood is drawn and it gives you a 3 month avg. look back. You should be under 6. I was 8.2, and have been at 6.2 ever since starting meds. which is considered good by the AMA and or whom ever moderates diabetics.
LCromwell:
You speak the truth. My point is that you cannot trust fasting blood sugars and if your doctor won't test your post-prandial blood sugar you need to do it yourself! The are doubtlessly millions of people put at risk because they do not know their true blood sugar status and their doctor's perform only the "lazy man's" test - fasting blood sugar! HbA1c is another good test if you can get your doc to order it!
Looking out for your heart health,
HeartHawk