Blood Sugar Levels Chart | High | Normal | Fasting
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Your blood sugar level is an important factor in you overall health and well being. It is also the most important indicator of diabetes, which is a serious disease that can cause disability or death if left untreated. Even for a for a completely healthy adult, blood sugar readings will vary widely over the course of a day, and effected by both exercising and eating
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Blood sugar measurements, like almost everything in medicine, science and technology, are made using the metric system. There’s nothing magical or exotic about the metric system, and it is used almost everywhere in the world aside from the U.S.
A liter is a bit more than a quart, and there are about 28 grams to an ounce. Mg is an abbreviation for the metric weight measurement of milligram, with the “milli” prefix meaning one thousandth. “DL” is a metric measurement for volume equaling one-tenth of a liter.
How to Read a Blood Sugar Levels Chart
So, what is the range of healthy levels of blood sugar? Again, it depends on when you measure it. A good time to take this reading is after you have fasted for six to eight hours. The American Diabetes Association recommends that it should be anywhere between 70 and 130 mg/dL at that point in time. After a meal, the Association recommends that it should be no more than 180 mg/dL. The analysis can be taken a bit further, because the recommendations are a bit different for women than they are for men. A proper Blood Sugar Level Chart would reflect these facts.
It is also considered unhealthy for an individual to have low blood sugar. A reading of less than 70 mg/dL is generally thought to be too low, and is categorized as a condition called hypoglycemia.
There is another measurement that can be made that will actually the calculate your average blood sugar over a three month period of time. A physician may order this test, the HbA1c measurement, either to screen for diabetes or to see how well a patient is managing his or her diabetes. Because it will measures your sugar level over three months, nothing you do in the short run will affect it, so no preparation of any sort is needed.
The results of the HbA1c measurements are generally reported in percentages. For non-diabetics, a Blood Sugar Level Chart based on this parameter would indicate that measurements between four and six percent is within target; anything below that is too low, and anything above that is too high.
For diabetics, the HbA1c reading is a measurement of good disease management. Thus, a Blood Sugar Level Chart for diabetics should indicate a continuum over the range of five percent to twelve percent. Five percent would be green for good, twelve percent would be red for very bad, and the light starting to turn yellow for caution at about seven percent.
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