Fasting Blood Glucose indicates what happens to your blood sugar if you’re not taking in any new supplies of energy through your food. However, it doesn’t provide any information about your body’s response to the things you normally eat, and that leaves a rather large hole in terms of understanding your condition.
If your doctor says you don’t have diabetes after a fasting blood glucose test, should you believe them? Probably not, and here’s why.
Fasting blood glucose (FBG) is a measure of glucose concentration in your blood after you’ve had nothing to eat for 8-12 hours. The test is typically used to monitor patients with existing diabetes, but may also be used to test for prediabetes and full-blown diabetes, a practice that has some significant flaws.
For one thing, FBG can only detect changes in your blood sugar that occur a significant way along the path of diabetes development. The blood sugar fluctuations that take place when you develop prediabetes are a result of insulin resistance, which occurs when excess fatty tissue (adipose) causes cells to stop responding to the instructions insulin is sending out. Your body fights this process when it first begins, generating more insulin to try and get the resistant cells back in line, so any type of blood sugar testing simply reflects the current state of your blood sugar, without detecting the turmoil behind the scenes.
Eventually, your body starts losing the battle against insulin resistance, and then blood sugar starts to rise. By the time an FBG test warns that your blood sugar is too high, you could have suffered irreversible tissue damage and face an extended recovery period – if, indeed, full reversal is still possible. And as if the thought of living with diabetes for the rest of your life wasn’t scary enough, insulin resistance also causes or exacerbates numerous other major health conditions, including heart disease, high blood pressure, and stroke.
That’s not the only problem with FBG
FBG indicates what happens to your blood sugar if you’re not taking in any new supplies of energy through your food. However, it doesn’t provide any information about your body’s response to the things you normally eat, and that leaves a rather large hole in terms of understanding your condition. Furthermore, there are varying interpretations of what constitutes a normal FBG and at what point your FBG score is indicative of developing diabetes.
