I have had a recent surge in patients with elevated blood sugar at the time of their cancer diagnosis. Many of them had no idea that they had high blood sugar. In fact, they’d always been told their blood sugar was normal on routine blood testing. And many of them ate fairly healthy diets, even low in refined sugar.

So what did I find and why?

I test everyone for hemoglobin A1C. This is a test that looks at red blood cells to see how much they are “glycosylated”, a change that happens to the red blood cells when they are around sugar. Red blood cells live on average for 3 months, so the amount they are glycosylated tells us how elevated someone’s blood sugar has been over the past 3 months.

Blood sugar can be elevated for several different reasons. Diet is the obvious one. Eat a diet high in refined sugar or refined flours and you will have elevated blood sugar. Stress is another one. When you are under stress, you body responds by elevating cortisol. Cortisol in turn causes your liver to increase glucose production & inhibit insulin production (the hormone you need to lower your blood glucose). Remember, if you think of stress in terms of a tiger attacking you, you want to have lots of glucose to be able to run away quickly. However, if the stress is because your child is driving you nuts, your boss won’t promote you, or the morning traffic won’t let up, you will have high amounts of circulating glucose with no muscles using them up. We also have genetic variability: some of us have inherited tendencies to not be able to manage our blood sugar well.

What’s the problem with high blood sugar?

With cancer, the problem is many-sided. Cancer is a big consumer of glucose and if you have high blood sugar, you are giving cancer a free ride. Elevated blood sugar is also linked to decreased effectiveness of treatments: radiation, chemotherapy, even surgery. Studies have shown that people with elevated blood sugar at the time of these cancer treatments are less likely to respond to the treatments and are more likely to have a cancer recurrence afterwards.

Metformin is a drug that lowers blood sugar. It was recently in the news because doctors were noticing that people who were on metformin had a lower incidence of being diagnosed with cancer. I don’t believe that metformin is the new cancer cure. However, I do believe that understanding your body and getting to the root of imbalances is the ultimate way to stay healthy. And if you have high blood sugar, it is imperative that you find a way to bring it back down.