Blood-sugar REVOLUTION

A French biochemist has discovered 4 ways to improve how the body uses glucose. Sara Gottfried, M.D., reveals how it can work wonders for your over-50 midsection

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On any given week, we might closely track the weather, our weight, the price of eggs or our favorite team. But our blood sugar? For those of us who don’t have diabetes, that’s hardly ever on our mind. Harvard- and MIT-trained women’s health expert Sara Gottfried, M.D., hopes to change that: “I want you to care about your blood sugar more than you care about your retirement account.”

Why? Because blood-sugar (or glucose) spikes trigger more than fatigue and cravings. Long-term, Dr. Gottfried warns, “They lead to cardiovascular disease and all of the downstream problems associated with accelerated aging.”

“Women experience the damaging effects of elevated glucose at lower thresholds than men,”adds Dr. Gottfried, noting that blood-sugar levels naturally rise beginning around age 50. In fact, research from Brazil finds 88% of postmenopausal women are metabolically unhealthy when it comes to how our body handles blood sugar.

Despite this nearly universal problem, blood sugar has historically been tricky to manage. Levels skyrocket after eating carbs, but within hours, they drop, driving us to grab another snack, setting off the sequence of events again. “When blood sugar is elevated, your metabolism gets slower and slower, while you may get fatter and fatter,” says Dr. Gottfried. How? A healthy body releases insulin to carry blood sugar out of the bloodstream and into muscles to burn as energy later. But the more carbs we eat and the more insulin is required, the faster our muscle storage runs out, forcing our body to switch to backup storage: fat cells. No wonder the National Institutes of Health finds that fluctuating blood-sugar levels make weight loss twice as hard.