Am I correct that drinking water does not help my blood sugar go down?

At least, not directly?

I have type-2 diabetes which I manage by exercise, diet, and, when absolutely necessary, oral medication. Generally my blood glucose control is good, but every so often I go high for one reason or another. The last time it happened I was with another diabetic I know, woffhandedly commented that I’d need to drink a lot of water that day to bring my blood sugar down. I commented that, yes, I probably would be thirsty and need to drink a lot of water, but that the water ingestion itself was not going to be responsible for the lowering of my BG; she disagreed, saying that she believed that the water drinking, in and of itself, would be helpful.

Any thoughts on who is correct?

I have reactive hypoglycemia and am for all purposes pre-diabetic, so I get crashes as opposed to highs. Water doesn’t alleviate my symptoms and I can’t think why it would help you OR me. The only things that bring mine back up are eating, or smoking for a quick counter to the adrenaline rush.

Unless she’s a medical professional, I see no reason to take her seriously. Sounds like she’s conflating correlation.

(bolding mine)

I should think it would help the dry mouth.

You’re both right.

You can get an *artificially *high blood glucose level if you’re dehydrated. There’s less water in the blood, and since blood glucose is measured by a percent of the volume of the liquid of blood, there would be a greater percentage of glucose in dehydrated blood than normal blood.

So it won’t decrease your reading as in move glucose into the cells like insulin does. But it may be that you don’t need to do that anyhow - your blood sugar only looks high because you need more water. And after drinking enough water, your blood sugar with read lower on the meter.

You need to get your hydration under control before you can effectively and accurately manage your blood sugar.

More info at: http://www.ehow.com/how-does_5202604_dehydration-affect-blood-glucose-levels_.html

IANA Nurse but my wife is. She is currently a school nurse for a diabetic kid and as per her schooling and the kid’s doctor water DOES help lower high blood sugar by diluting and flushing out your system.

It would be a pretty easy thing to test if you have one of those glucose testing thingys…

I was thinking along these lines. My understanding that one of the symptoms of diabetes mellitus is sugar in your urine.(Hence the supposed ancient Greek and Chinese tests for detecting it.) Just checking the Wiki it confirms this to a point, if you’re blood sugar is really high your kidney’s won’t re-absorb all of the glucose.

The short answer is that no, water will not help with high blood sugar, although dehydration can cause blood sugar readings to be inaccurate.

Sure, but that doesn’t mean that drinking water helps. WhyNot’s post & cite seems more plausible to me.

I think it would be more accurate to say that drinking a lot of water would make your reading artificially lower. It wouldn’t really benefit you as much as the numbers would indicate.

This is the correct answer.

If you are type 2 then your body is still producing insulin. Exercise will bring your BG down. I’ve tested my blood and had it be somewhat high (~160) then jumped for 10 minutes on my mini-trampoline, tested again and it was 130.

Above a certain threshold, glucose overwhelms the capacity of the kidneys to reabsorb it, and it spills into the urine. This is typically around 180mg/deciliter or so; it varies among individuals. If the underlying physiology is such that the glucose levels remains high for a prolonged period of time, the patient will become dehydrated (assuming they don’t replenish their free water by drinking) because the glucose drags out free water with it. In those types of situations, the blood glucose tends to continue to rise as the patient becomes increasingly dehydrated, and in that scenario, drinking water will reconstitute the patient’s blood volume and by dilution lower the blood glucose.

What more typically happens with mild elevations is that the patient’s thirst mechanism kicks in once they start spilling glucose and losing free water with it, and they tend to keep up.

In general, just drinking water won’t lower your glucose because it’s really hard to drink faster than your kidneys can pee out excess free water. However it’s fair to say that drinking generously when your glucose is high will help prevent more serious problems.

Any hyperglycemic state is a complex combination of insulin resources, various other hormones, glucose load, and so on, so it’s hard to just say arbitrarily what the exact effect of “drinking water” would be in a particular situation.

Isn’t the max your kidneys can do something like 3 gallons/hr or so? (I think I saw that on Mystery Diagnosis and they mentioned what the max was because they were discussing a case of a girl who had diabetes insipidus. IE her kidney’s went full bore all the time)

The question really is “Why is a diabetic’s blood sugar so high?”

The body needs insulin for most of the body’s cells to be able to use the glucose in the blood for energy. When the cells need glucose, they use hormones that tell the liver to dump more glucose into the blood stream.

Type II diabetics suffer from two different issues: One is “insulin resistance” and the other is a shortage of insulin. Everybody has some insulin resistance, but people with Diabetes Type II tend to have greater than average insulin resistance. Therefore, they tend to require more insulin.

As a person gets older, they naturally get more insulin resistant, and their pancreas produces less and less insulin. At some point, the body simply cannot produce the insulin it needs.

Because of the lack of insulin combined with the high insulin resistance, the cells of your body cannot metabolize the glucose they need. Therefore, they send signals to the liver to dump more glucose into the body. The liver dumps more glucose. However, if the body can’t use the glucose due to high insulin resistance and the lack of adequate insulin, the glucose remains in the blood. Thus producing high blood glucose levels.

Unless you are severely dehydrated, drinking water won’t help. Sooner or later, your body is simply going to replace the glucose because the cells are demanding glucose.

There are two treatments for Type II diabetes. 1). Increase the amount of insulin. 2). Decrease Insulin resistance.

Medications classified as Sulfonylureas increase your insulin production. Others help lower insulin resistance or slow down the liver’s ability to flood the body with glucose. You can also decrease insulin resistance by decreasing the amount of body fat – especially around the waist. Regular aerobic exercise will also decrease insulin resistance.

Stress can increase your insulin resistance. It’s one of the reasons for gestational diabetes. This normally happens in women who are borderline diabetics and then become pregnant. The extra stress is enough to trigger a diabetes diagnosis. Usually, the blood glucose returns to normal after the pregnancy, but women who have had gestational diabetes are more likely to become diagnosed with diabetes when they get older.

Another disease called PCOS is related to diabetes. In it, the body produces too much insulin which can cause abnormal and irregular menstrual cycles, hair loss, and of course cysts in the ovaries.

It is?

I thought the question was, “Am I correct that drinking water does not help my blood sugar go down?” with a clarification that “every so often I go high.”

From this context, I assume Skald wants to know whether or not drinking water will lower his (abnormally) high glucose during those episodes where it is elevated, for whatever reason…

There is an upper limit to physiological normal kidneys excreting free water; if you drink free water in excess of that (hard to do, but possible) you get acute water intoxication, which is kind of a cool problem all by itself. If you drink isotonic water with appropriate electrolytes, you might even manage to put yourself in overload congestive heart failure.

Folks with diabetes insipidus can have a central malfunction (not making ADH or not making its releaser) or a renal malfunction (kidneys don’t respond to ADH). I wonder if the case you describe, though, wasn’t a compulsive water drinker. They are the most fun to diagnose, and also quite tricky because prolonged compulsive water drinking washes out the renal concentrating gradient and they become hard to distinguish from DI since water restriction fails to maximally concentrate their urine (this is the easiest test for DI). It’s a whole cool topic, but way off-topic here, so I’ll leave it at that.

I don’t know the maximum output for defective kidneys, but 3 gallons (12+ liters/hr) seems insanely high, and I don’t know how you could keep up with the solute loss at that level of output. 12L/day is pretty high…

I’ve never seen water do a damn thing for my blood sugar, and water is my go-to drink every day. I’d chalk it up to yet another myth about diabetes.

The thing that makes your blood sugar go down is insulin.

If you’re type 2, you are still making insulin, so your mission is to sensitize your body to the insulin you are making. Losing fat, especially fat around your mid-section, will do this. Exercise will bring it down also in the short term by causing your body to make more insulin.

If you’re type 1, you don’t make insulin anymore; that’s why you have to inject it. If you’re type 1, exercise will not, in the short or long run, bring your blood sugar down. Why? Because insulin is what brings it down, and your body doesn’t make it any more.

What makes it go UP? Different things. Carbs of any kind, not just straight sugar. Stress. An infection in the body. But only one thing brings it down: insulin, either the insulin you MAKE or the insulin you INJECT.

It’s a difficult condition to wrap your brain around. You’ll find good, solid, non-fad, non-myth info here: http://www.diabetes-solution.net/

I think you’re missing the point. If water is your to-go drink, then absent vomitting or diarrhea or excessive exercise, chances are you’re *not *dehydrated. So of course there wouldn’t be any effect on your blood sugars for you, a well hydrated person. Drinking water only “affects” blood sugar in that it can give an abnormally high reading on the meter if you are dehydrated. That’s not a myth, it’s math. It’s the way a glucometer measures.

Imagine you have a gram of sugar in a bowl. You add 10 liters of water. When you measure how many parts per million of your solution is sugar, you get 100. Now you heat it, and let half the water evaporate out like you’re making a sugar syrup. You measure it again, and you get 200 parts per million, because half your “parts” in water is gone, making your solution twice as strong. Add 5 liters of water, bringing it back to the amount of water you had when you started, and measure it again, and you’ll get 100 again. You never changed how much sugar is in your bowl, only how much water is in your bowl.

Same thing when a person is dehydrated: the sugar isn’t really high, the water’s low. But because the one is measured in relation to the other, the ratio is off, and the ratio is what your meter is testing. There’s not really too much glucose in your blood, there’s too little water. Add more water - until you get to the amount of water blood is supposed to have in it -and your glucose reading will be correct.

Regarding the issue of exercise: In my experience, it depends on the type and length of exercise. I have had very good luck with immediate lowering of a high blood glucose number by going out and having a 10-to-20-minute brisk walk.

However, when I was training for my half-marathon last year, several times my blood sugar was actually higher when I came back from my training run than before I left. We’re not talking mondo high here, but like, I rose from 120 to 140. This was anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half of exercise at which my heart rate was averaging around 155-160 bpm, for what that is worth.

This supports what I’ve been posting. A short bout of exercise will bring your blood sugar down. However hard aerobic training qualifies as “stress” and will send your blood sugar up (in your case, not a lot, but still up).

Try testing your BG after a screaming argument with your SO or a major crying jag. :rolleyes: