You know that feeling you get after you eat a big, delicious meal? Most of us just write off that groggy haze as something that “just happens,” but it’s actually fascinating when you dive under the hood.
The infamous “post-meal slump” is usually people’s most intimate interaction with how blood sugar levels can impact us. So, while that gluten-free, grain-free, paleo banana bread might be delicious — and frankly, is making us hungry as we write this — it’s very important to understand how it impacts our blood sugar (also known as glucose) levels. The interesting thing is that a yummy treat like this is likely to affect everyone’s glucose levels differently, based on our body’s unique and personalized response to food.
Keeping Your Blood Sugar Stable
Whatever the case, if your glucose levels are out of a fairly narrow range, you might just feel off. Despite glucose being a key molecule in the body associated with energy, many of us don’t track it closely, and may not have a clear idea what it feels like to have very stable glucose.
If your glucose levels are erratic, you can experience sharp spikes and crashes in energy and lose focus, and if this happens over the long term, it can potentially put you at risk for a wide variety of health conditions.
In this article, we’re going to demystify glucose levels for the healthy person, and why stabilizing glucose levels in a healthy range can benefit your life in 3 major ways.
1. Boost Mental Clarity
Could tracking our glucose levels be a clue to making us more focused, clear-headed, and mentally sharp? Research suggests yes.
In one study, researchers gave healthy participants a drink loaded with glucose and then tracked their blood glucose levels. Based on the results, participants were categorized into three groups: “better glucose regulators,” “average glucose regulators,” and “worse glucose regulators.”
The “worse glucose regulators” had higher post-drink glucose peaks and were slower to get their glucose levels back down to their pre-meal levels. This group also did the poorest on a variety of verbal memory tests, such as assessments for performance on word list recall, word order recall, and paragraph recall.
