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Just keep your blood sugar at 83.

By Tim Lundeen  Beginning Noozer
Published: 17 January 2008 02:19 pm

- It looks like the most important part of feeling good, being healthy, and living a long life is to keep your blood sugar at 83.

83 is important, because when your blood sugar is below this is the level, your pancreas stops producing insulin. This suggests that 83 is the "set point" at which your body tries to keep your blood sugar.

I just finished Dr Bernstein's superb book on diabetes, and he confirms this. In his practice, he has taken thousands of samples from healthy, non-diabetic, non-overweight people, and their blood sugar is always 83 (+/- 3). He recommends that his diabetic patients keep their blood sugar here, and he has managed his own to this level for nearly 40 years.

The problem is that as you age, and eat a typical Western diet, your pancreas is gradually damaged and can't keep your blood sugar under tight control. Your fasting blood sugar rises, and the time it takes to get your blood sugar back to normal after a meal goes from an hour or two up to 5-6 hours, or much longer, depending on the degree of damage. (When I started working on lowering my blood sugar, it never got to 83 at all. I would eat another meal first, and my blood sugar would stay around 100.)

I see three benefits of keeping your blood sugar under tighter control.

• Short term, within 6-8 weeks, you will feel better: healthier, stronger, and more energetic.
   
  
• Mid term, keeping your blood sugar at 83 will virtually eliminate the risk of getting diabetes as you get older, and will dramatically reduce your risk of dying from cancer, heart attack, stoke, or kidney failure. It also dramatically reduces the risk of dementia.
   
• Longer term, the goal is to survive until Ending Aging techniques can repair age-related damange, and keeping your blood sugar at 83 maximizes your chances.
  
  One reason tight control of blood sugar helps is that after diabetes, cancer, heart attack, and stroke, the next most common cause of death is an impaired immune system. (As you age, your thymus stops being as effective, and your memory T cells start to crowd out the naive T cells you need to fight off new infections.) We are making rapid progress on repairing immune systems, and there is an excellent chance that this will be routine in the next 10-20 years. If so, then your life expentancy will go up significantly if you have been keeping your blood sugar at 83, so that you only need this one advance to add decades to your expected lifespan.

(Obviously, there are no guarantees with life. Keeping your blood sugar at 83 is a very good thing, but doesn't mean that all risk is eliminated.)

How do you go about doing this? See my article on managing your blood sugar.