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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If your pancreas makes insulin, it makes a version of insulin that only persists in the body for a short time (like a few minutes). As soon as there’s no need to lower blood sugar, the pancreas stops making insulin and the signal goes away. It can overshoot slightly and give you an uncomfortable sugar crash, but a functioning pancreas can respond fast enough that it won’t push your blood sugar dangerously low.
Injecting precisely calculated doses of insulin every 5 minutes isn’t feasible for diabetics, so pharmaceutical companies developed chemically modified insulins that stick around for longer. The problem with that is that the modified insulins will persist in the body and keep lowering blood sugar after that’s no longer needed.
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