Ep 4: Blood Sugar Explained: Natural Ways to Balance Glucose, Energy & Prevent Diabetes

Are blood sugar swings affecting your energy, weight, and long-term health?

In this episode of Get Healthy and Stay Healthy NATURALLY, Dr. Howard Pallay explains the science of sugar metabolism in simple terms and why healthy blood sugar balance is essential for overall wellness.

Drawing from more than 50 years of clinical experience, Dr. Howard discusses how the pancreas and insulin work together, why poor eating habits can contribute to blood sugar imbalances, and practical ways to support healthy glucose metabolism naturally.

Whether you're trying to improve your energy, prevent blood sugar spikes, or better understand prediabetes, this episode provides valuable educational insights.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How sugar metabolism works
• The role of insulin and the pancreas
• Why blood sugar spikes and crashes happen
• The difference between healthy and unhealthy carbohydrates
• Why sugary foods can lead to fatigue
• Understanding hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia
• Healthy fruits and carbohydrates for better blood sugar control
• Simple nutrition habits that support steady energy
• Practical strategies for long-term metabolic health

If you're looking to better understand blood sugar, improve your nutrition, and make healthier choices, this episode is a great place to start.

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This podcast is intended for educational purposes only and should not replace professional medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider before making changes to your diet, supplements, or treatment plan.

Transcript

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After 50 years in natural health, I'm Dr. Howard Palay, and I'll show you how to get healthy and stay healthy naturally. Welcome to Get Healthy, Stay Healthy, Naturally with Dr. Howard Pele, Episode 4. Today we're going to discuss sugar metabolism and the pancreas. So this is a very interesting topic, and it's very poorly understood by the general public. Sometimes I wonder how much the doctors really understand it. So I'm going to give you my layperson's common sense logic explanation and understanding of what's going on. So you eat a healthy meal, okay? You have vegetables, you have soup, you drink water, you have some sort, uh, some broiled salmon, uh, some all kinds of vegetables, especially yuchoy, bok choy, whatever. You have some rice with it, and this is a healthy meal. A healthy meal takes about two hours or so to digest. Okay. What happens in the first thing is that you start to chew the meal in your mouth, okay, that you masticate or chew. As you do that, your mouth, and the the some of the tissue in the mouth releases salivary amylase enzymes, which begin to digest a little bit of the food. Okay. Primarily, what they do is it is it breaks down the bond of two molecules of glucose put together, which is called sucrose or dextrose, and a little bit of sugar begins to be released into your system as the food goes down into your stomach for further digestion. There's a biofeedback mechanism that occurs with endocrine glands. We'll talk a lot about endocrine glands as we go along, but in this case we're talking about the pancreas, okay? So a certain amount of sugar is released in that first 15-20 minutes that's being digested by the salivary amylase enzymes. And we're going to call that amount of sugar release, which varies every meal, as a small X. Whatever that amount is, doesn't matter. The biofeedback tells the pancreas, the tail of the pancreas, where the isolates of Langerhorn are, where insulin is made and released. It tells it, hey, there's food coming in the pipeline. So the body assumes that you're intelligent and you ate a healthy meal. So whatever that number X is, okay, the body's gonna release more than X of insulin. Let's say two and a half times as much. That's a made-up number, please, okay? That's just to give an example. Because what's gonna happen is your sugar level is gonna start to rise, and you could see this on a glucose tolerance test, which is not done that much anymore. And then the insulin comes in, utilizes the glucose until the insulin is gone and the glucose is back to what we call resting blood sugar. You always have to have a little bit of glucose in your bloodstream for energy for emergencies, for brain function, et cetera. Okay? So that sounds like, well, we need we're gonna explain more. Now, what insulin does is it's highly volatile. Every cell in the body needs insulin to uptake glucose, bring it through the cell wall, and into the mitochondria of the cell, which is the powerhouse of the cell, which may have been a different organism in development of humans, okay, and mammals. In the mitochondria, the glucose forms a bond with something called ATP eight times. It makes the bond, breaks the bond. Makes the bond, breaks the bond eight times. That's what gives mammals, and we are a mammal, that's what gives us energy, okay? This is called the Krebs citric acid cycle. Has nothing to do with citric acid and orange juice. Dr. Krebs is the guy who discovered and named the whole process that we now understand about how sugar metabolism works. So you need sugar for energy, right? So what's the problem here? We're gonna explain the problem, okay? Now, instead of a healthy meal, you're gonna eat, you're gonna drink two glasses of soda, two glasses of orange juice because it's great for you, right? Orange juice is not that much better than soda. They're both garbage, okay? And then you're gonna have like a couple of Twinkies, a couple of ringdings, uh, sticky gooey chocolate cake. And by the time you're done, a couple of things have happened. You remember that little X of sugar that's released in the first 20 minutes? Well, now you have a massive amount of sugar. So X is really big. But your body doesn't know that you're being stupid, that you're an idiot and ate a really unhealthy meal. So it's still gonna release two and a half times X of insulin. But here's the other problem. Did that meal that we just say take two hours to digest? Hell no. That stuff will digest in a half hour. So not only do you have a massive amount of sugar, it's released extremely quickly. Okay? So now your body releases a massive amount of sugar, and then at the same time, an even more massive amount of insulin. The insulin is gonna take up all this glucose into your cells. Now you have way too much sugar going in, way too much energy, and now you have too much insulin, which is highly volatile. The insulin has to be used before it can disappear. So it's gonna start using up your resting blood sugar. Now your blood sugar is gonna go too low, even though you got this massive amount. So you get this massive amount, and then the person or the kid is all hyper because they have all this energy, all this sugar, and then all it's used up, and then you crash. And your body goes, danger, danger, need more sugar, more glucose, danger. And the body tells you you gotta eat more. So you then you eat more. And if you ate more crappy food over a number of years, your pancreas gets bigger and bigger. It makes more and more insulin, releases more and more insulin, demands more and more sugar until one day it goes, screw you, okay? And it doesn't make enough insulin, and eventually it stops making it. So then you go from low blood sugar from eating a crappy diet, and then you go eventually go to a high blood sugar, hyperglycemia versus hypoglycemia, low blood sugar, and and hyperglycemia is not enough insulin. The glucose is floating around, your cells can't pick it up, and they're starving for energy. And then you're tired, and your body gets sicker and sicker and sicker, and you go into pre-diabetes into diabetes. Okay? So that's really what happens. How do we fix this? Well, of course, the first thing is eat a healthier freaking diet, okay? You can't eat junk food, garbage food, candy, sugar sauces. You shouldn't even eat fruit on an empty stomach. We're gonna get back to that. We've talked of that previously, but we'll get back into that. So we need glucose, but we need it in a healthy form because we need it to release gradually. We don't want a massive assault of sugar, glucose, okay? Again, if you put sugar into your coffee or into a recipe, that's called sucroseodextrose from cane sugar, from corn sugar, from corn syrup, okay? That's called sucroseodextrose. It's two molecules of glucose put together. The bond is easily broken by enzymes like amylases, and then the glucose flows in your bloodstream, and it's going to power your engine, which is fine, but you can't have a massive amount and you can't have it all coming at the same time. It needs to be released gradually, okay? Let's talk about fruit for a second. Fruit sugar is called fructose. Fructose is one molecule of galactose, which is not digestible by humans, and one molecule of glucose, but it's too much glucose, even though half of it is not digestible. Most fruit has too much sugar, a lot of sugar. So the first thing with sugar is if you're having sugar problems, hypoglycemia, low blood sugar, or you're pre-diabetic, you got to stop fruit for a while, not forever. And then when you eat it again, there are certain fruits that are better than others, and it should be eaten on a full stomach, kind of like you can call it a dessert. But my point is it's after eating a healthy full meal, okay? You can't eat it as a snack. We'll get to snack foods and what to eat and stuff in a few minutes. But let's talk about this a little bit further in depth, okay? So uh fructose is not good either, especially any fruit that you could squeeze in your hand and juice comes out. That's sugar water. That means grapes, that means all these berries that everybody thinks is wonderful. The problem with berries is yes, they have a lot of antioxidants, but not enough to make a difference. You have to eat a huge amount of berries to really get enough antioxidants out of it. So if you have to eat a bucket of them, then you're getting a tremendous amount of sugar with a little bit of antioxidants. This is not a good trade-off. It doesn't mean when you're feeling well and you're healthy and eating a healthy diet, you can't put a little berries into yogurt, a little berries into your oatmeal, etc. But you can't eat that as like a meal, like, oh, I'm gonna snack on a bunch of blueberries now. Like, no, this is not a healthy food this way, okay? Um, you want to eat fruits that have fiber content, like apples. You can't squeeze an apple and get juice out of it unless you're Iron Man. You could put anything into a press and create juice from it, but you have to chew, masticate, and digest an apple, and then slowly release sugar, and it's a decent amount of sugar, but if you do that on a full stomach, it's mixing with the other food and releasing it gradually. That's what the trick is. So the healthy fruits, not in the early stages of sugar problem, but when you're doing better, always on a full stomach, never on an empty stomach, never oranges on an empty stomach, are apples, pears, bananas, papayas, avocados, honeydew melon, and cantaloupe are the basic ones that are pretty healthy. Again, not on an empty stomach. Okay, so that's the story with fructose. Okay. Now, what do we do to get people better? Well, we take sugar stabilizing supplements, which have enzymes and they have uh uh chromium picklin in it. That's one of the major things. I have a particular supplement that I like. Again, eventually my website will have all these names listed for you, and there'll also be a way for you to order it directly if you so desire or go get your own. But if you order from my website, hopefully I'll be setting up discounts and free shipping, and you'll be getting supplements that are tried and tested by me for 30, 40 years. I know which ones work. Some supplements, we don't know who makes them. Some supplements made by pharmaceutical companies. Listen, they make drugs fine, they're concentrates. They don't know how to make natural substances so well. Some of them do, some of them don't. I deal with companies, I know who they are, I know how they manufacture, I know what their sources are. I deal with the best companies. That's what I do. And you can order them through the distributorship that I will put you in touch with through my website when everything gets set up online. So getting back to finish up with sugar, uh, what else we need to talk about? So there's a little sugar in everything. Like, you know, rice is considered a high glycemic index food, but it's really not because it takes a while to digest rice. And rice will release the sugar gradually and keep your energy for a while. When you have low blood sugar, one of the first things I want people to do, besides eating a healthier diet, I don't like people going more than three hours without eating something. I'd rather you eat small meals every three hours. This is not forever, okay? When you're doing well, you should eat a nice breakfast and a lunch and a light dinner that's more protein heavy, okay? Always eat vegetables, always drink water, always drink soups, and all the other vegetables are healthy too, but we know that the dark green leafy vegetables are the best and the healthiest and have almost zero side effects at all, okay? So this is to give you a little bit of overview on how to diagnose and treat sugar problems. Sugar patients, by the way, have some very unique characteristics, in my opinion. They pee frequently, okay? Excessively frequently. And we're not just talking about old men with a prostate problem. We're talking about anybody. They have extreme fatigue in the middle of the day. They're always yawning. They can't keep their eyes open. These are also often sugar problems. Another weird sugar thing that I'm gonna tell you as a chiropractor and a person who deals with pain, when people have pain that moves around, oh no, no, no, no. Pain does not move around. But you know what does move around? Inflammation caused by having a low blood sugar problem will give people the sensation of pain moving from area to area to area. First thing I look at when somebody tells me that, I check to see if they're having a sugar problem. Okay? So I hope this helps you to understand a little better. We want you to eat complex carbs because they digest slower but still give you energy. We want you to eat a meal that has a complex of foods so that the energy is released slowly and you can eat sugar and candy and cake and junk food pretty much ever, but certainly never on an empty stomach. Okay? I hope that helps you. And the next podcast will be probably on endocrine problems. 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SPEAKER_00 14:13

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