My understanding is that diabetics have a pancreas that does not produce insulin or the body has stopped reacting to insulin, which mean they can get really high blood sugar because nothing metabolizes is.
But why does that cause diabetic people to also get low blood sugar more often than non-diabetics? If I eat a cake, my body produces a bunch of insulin to metabolize, then I go work out for an hour, my blood sugar won’t be as low as a diabetic who did the same.
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Diabetes is a disease that keeps the blood sugar too high for too long. It cannot go too low by itself. The medicinal treatment for diabetes is to add artificial insulin. The problem is we usually take the same prescribed quantity of artificial insulin. But the body’s requirement for insulin changes from day to day and meal to meal, which means the artificial insulin dosage is sometimes higher or sometimes lower. Also, generally people who have diabetes tend to be people who consume a lot of sugar. So doctors who monitor/adjust dosage tend to prescribe a bit higher than perfect. This mismatch of the body’s requirement, vs standardized dosage and erroring on the side of low blood sugar than high blood sugar, diabetics who are taking insulin can have a lot of situations with low blood sugar.
To your example, the reason why a diabetic can have a significantly lower blood sugar after excercise is that your body can stop the insulin production at anytime; but for the diabetic it cannot stop the insulin at any time. Whatever is put in will keep reducing the blood sugar until the insulin is removed, so they end up with lower blood sugar.
There is a role for the reverse glycogen process but it’s slow compared to the insulin part and that’s why insulin’s effect is more prominent. If diabetics can stay alive/sane for sometime during their low blood sugar period, they should come back to normal levels by itself, but this can be extremely dangerous
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