Natural Ways to Lower Blood Sugar Levels

Knowing how to naturally lower your blood sugar levels is essential for controlling prediabetes or diabetes. Consider frequent exercise, consuming more fiber, including extra snacks, and boosting your probiotic dosage.

Diabetes and prediabetes are linked to high blood sugar, often known as hyperglycemia. Prediabetes is defined as having high blood sugar levels but not being diabetic.

Normally, your body maintains blood sugar levels by making insulin, a hormone that allows your cells to use the sugar in your blood. As a result, insulin is the most essential blood sugar regulator (1Reliable Source).

However, a variety of circumstances can compromise blood sugar control and result in hyperglycemia.

Internal causes of high blood sugar include your liver producing too much glucose, your body producing insufficient insulin, or your body’s inability to effectively use insulin. Insulin resistance is a term used to describe the latter (1 Trusted Source).

Dietary choices, some drugs, a sedentary lifestyle, and stress are examples of external variables (1Trusted Source, 2Trusted Source).

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 13% of individuals in the United States have diabetes, while another 34.5% have prediabetes. This means that nearly half of all adults in the United States have diabetes or prediabetes (3Trusted Source).

Blood sugar control is especially crucial for diabetics since chronically high blood sugar levels can lead to limb and life-threatening consequences (1Reliable Source).

Here are 14 simple and scientifically proven strategies to naturally reduce your blood sugar levels.

Exercise on a regular basis.

Regular exercise can help you achieve and maintain a healthy weight, as well as improve insulin sensitivity (4Trusted Source).

Increased insulin sensitivity means that your cells can use the available sugar in your bloodstream more efficiently.

Exercise also aids in the utilization of blood sugar for energy and muscular contraction (4Trusted Source).

If you struggle with blood sugar control, consider testing your levels before and after exercising on a regular basis. This will assist you in learning how you respond to various activities and will protect your blood sugar levels from becoming too high or low (5).

Furthermore, researchers propose “exercise snacks” to reduce blood sugar and avoid the damage that sitting all day might cause (6Trusted Source).

Simply break up your sitting time every 30 minutes for a few minutes during the day with exercise snacks. Light walking or modest resistance workouts like squats or leg raises are among the exercises recommended.

Weightlifting, brisk walking, running, biking, dancing, hiking, swimming, and other activities are also beneficial. In fact, any activity that gets you up and moving on a regular basis, regardless of intensity, outperforms a sedentary lifestyle.

Furthermore, if you have difficulty allocating longer lengths of time to exercise throughout the week, you can still reap many benefits by undertaking shorter sessions. Try aiming for 10-minute exercise sessions three times a day for five days, with a weekly goal of 150 minutes.

Control your carbohydrate consumption.

Your carbohydrate intake has a significant impact on your blood sugar levels (7Reliable Source).

Carbohydrates are broken down by your body into sugars, primarily glucose. Then, insulin assists your body in utilizing and storing it for energy.

When you consume too many carbohydrates or have insulin-function issues, this process fails and blood glucose levels rise.

As a result, the American Diabetes Association (ADA) suggests that patients with diabetes regulate their carb consumption by counting carbs and understanding how many they require (8).

According to several research, this can help you plan your meals more effectively, improving blood sugar management (9Trusted Source, 10Trusted Source).

Many studies have also shown that consuming a low carbohydrate diet helps control blood sugar levels and prevent blood sugar spikes (11Trusted Source, 12Trusted Source, 13Trusted Source).

It is critical to understand that low carb diets and no carb diets are not the same thing.

When monitoring your blood sugar, you can still eat some carbohydrates. However, choosing whole grains over processed grains and refined carbohydrates gives more nutritional value while also helping to lower blood sugar levels (14Trusted Source).

Consume more fiber.

Fiber promotes a more gradual rise in blood sugar levels by slowing glucose digestion and sugar absorption (15Trusted Source).

Fiber is classified into two types: insoluble and soluble.

While both are beneficial, soluble fiber has been clearly demonstrated to enhance blood sugar regulation, whilst insoluble fiber has not (15Trusted Source, 16Trusted Source).

A high fiber diet can help your body balance blood sugar and prevent blood sugar lows. This could help you manage type 1 diabetes better (17Reliable Source).

Fiber-rich foods include the following:

vegetables fruits legumes
complete grains
Fiber consumption should be around 25 grams for women and 35 grams for males per day. That works out to roughly 14 grams per 1,000 calories (18Trusted Source).