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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> ELI5: How do non-diabetics keep their blood sugar from going low?
To better understand that we’ll have to understand how the body handles energy.
When you eat something your body starts a process to break it down into energy. It cycles around the blood stream for a bit getting used by the organs as needed and any excess gets put into storage.
When a person does something they use up their immediate reserve, mostly just the nutrients currently cycling in the blood stream. This process is faster than the body can break down food, or maybe it has no food to break down in the first place. So the body starts breaking down the stored energy as well.
Insulin is a chemical required by the body to move this energy – aka sugar – into the muscles, organs, and fat (storage). So high insulin should mean low amounts of sugar in the blood because it’s quickly being moved into other spaces. And low insulin should mean high amounts of sugar in the blood because it’s stuck in there.
If you’re with me so far, you already have your answer. __Everyone’s bodies__ tries to keep their blood sugar from going low by pulling it out of the food or storage as needed.
But for more information. Diabetics have problems with their bodies producing insulin. Because of this they have to manually take a supplement amount, often blindly guessing at just how much they really need.
As a result, the excessive insulin demands the body to dump sugar into cells as fast as it can, dropping the amount of sugar in the blood. And other organs, like the brain, may not receive enough due to the body picking to much of it up. Which means those organs stop operating like they should.
This also happens the other way. Not enough insulin makes the sugar sit in the blood stream instead of entering the organs it needs to. Since the body can’t move into the cells to supply sugar for energy, the body thinks it needs to start breaking storage down. – Producing another source of energy collectively called ketones which are highly acidic. – but that’s not actually what the body needs right now. So it just creates more problems.
So like Goldielocks, we need just the right amount of insulin (and sugar) in our system to function. Too hot or to cold is just a different kind of problem.
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