Assessing Your Glucose and Insulin Status

Assessing Your Glucose and Insulin Status

To assess how your body is handling glucose and insulin, your practitioner can
order blood work that examines your fasting glucose and insulin levels, and a
protein called hemoglobin A1c (HA1c). The fasting glucose number will tell you
what your blood glucose level is at a given moment. A range between 70 and 90 is
generally considered optimal.

An HA1c level is taken about once every three months, and reflects an average
blood-sugar level over that period of time. Be aware that it’s possible to have
seemingly normal blood glucose levels and still have high levels of insulin in your
body. This is important to know so that, if necessary, you can adjust your diet to
bring your fasting insulin level into a safe range. This, too, can be assessed through
standard laboratory blood work.

Nurse practitioner and diabetes educator Rebecca Murray is assistant clinical
professor of nursing at Yale University and runs a medical practice in Groton,
Connecticut, where she specializes in diabetes and insulin resistance syndrome.
Based on her thousands of patient case studies, Murray suggests (pers. comm.) that
an optimal range for HA1c is between 4 and 5.6, and for fasting insulin up to 12
microunits per milliliter. These numbers are based on a twelve-hour fast (ibid.).
Keep in mind that if you have a very heavy meal the night before your blood is
drawn, your insulin levels could be higher than normal the next morning. So, be
sure to test more than once (later that week, for example) to be sure you’ve got an
accurate result.