Hypoglycemia is one of those really interesting and poorly understood issues that patients seem to know more about than doctors. If you’ve experienced hypoglycemia, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You often know it when you have it, but the medical system rarely seems to be able to help you. In this video I’ll explain the number one cause that I’ve seen for hypoglycemia.

I experienced hypoglycemia for most of my youth, and in my 25-year career I have had a lot of patients tell me that they have hypoglycemia. And in my experience, it has everything to do with your digestion.

Hypoglycemia means that you experience low blood sugar, and that you must eat on a very regular basis, maybe every 2 hours or so, in order to keep your energy up and maintain a normal persona.

Hypoglycemia doesn’t always show up on blood tests as low blood sugar, but patients generally know it when they feel it.

Why Does Hypoglycemia Happen?

What I have seen and experienced myself is that hypoglycemia is very often, and maybe most of the time, related to how well you are digesting and absorbing your food. Because if you don’t break down your food well, then you can’t get all of the nutrients out of that food that you normally would get.

Not everyone who has hypoglycemia has digestive symptoms, but I believe that almost all of them have an underlying digestive problem that is causing them to not absorb or assimilate the nutrients that they are ingesting.

When this happens, it results in being able to eat a lot of food, but not actually getting a lot out of that food.

When I was young, and all the way up into my 30s, people always told me that I had a super high metabolism because I could eat anything and everything and not gain any weight.

What they didn’t know was that I absolutely had to eat like that.  I got irritable and unbalanced if I didn’t eat every couple of hours, and I was exhausted all the time. I had to be super conscious of making sure that I had food with me at all times.

Now not everyone who’s hypoglycemic is underweight, because that doesn’t always go with it. But I believe that poor nutrition due to malabsorption almost always goes with it, assuming that you aren’t diabetic. If you’re diabetic then that is a separate issue that can cause hypoglycemia.

I also had IBS, meaning that I had frequent diarrhea and very poor digestion. I didn’t realize how bad it was until it was gone, but once I solved my IBS, my digestive system was able to heal.

And as my digestive tract gradually healed, I discovered that I could go longer and longer between meals, and that eventually I no longer had hypoglycemia. I was normal, which meant that I could go hours and hours without eating and without getting hangry. I would only get hungry.

I’ve also seen this happen in my patients, which has led me to believe that hypoglycemia is really all about your digestion and how well you are absorbing the nutrients that you eat.

This is especially true for people with diarrhea, which is a super obvious form of malabsorption of your food. But I’ve seen it with constipation as well. Once those issues are solved, people usually see their hypoglycemia improve as well.

But in some cases, there are no digestive problems at all. I’ll give you an example.

Did you know that many people with celiac disease don’t have any digestive issues?  But celiac disease always involves the digestive tract at the microscopic level, meaning that it can still lead to the poor absorption of nutrients, even in the absence of digestive symptoms.

This has been well studied. And one of the consequences of this is that many people with celiac disease are also hypoglycemic, whether or not they have digestive symptoms.

Fortunately, they get better once they learn to avoid gluten and allow their gut to heal.  Unfortunately, there are hundreds of other causes of poor digestion, so it’s not as simple as having everyone remove gluten.

But know that there is a reason that you have hypoglycemia, and there is hope for getting better. So please don’t give up, because there is a solution for you too.

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