SUGAR SHOCK! Can Be Deadly: High Blood Sugar Triggers About 3.1 Million Deaths A Year, Researchers Find

Frequently putting yourself into SUGAR SHOCK! can be downright deadly.

I’m not usually this blunt, but new research flat out shows that about 3.1 million people around the world are unnecessarily dying just because their blood sugar levels soar too high. What pains me is that these deaths are, by and large, unnecessary!

What it comes down to, points out WedMD Medical News, is that high blood sugar "is among the world’s top five killers."

What’s especially intriguing to me is your blood sugar levels don’t have to be in the diabetic range to contribute to your early mortality.

Indeed, the analysis, which was published in the revered medical journal, The Lancet, reveals that elevated blood sugar levels — but not high enough to be considered diabetic — kill about 2.1 million people every year, with 1.5 million from heart disease and 700,000 from stroke. Then, another 960,000 fatalities are due to diabetes. That addds up to some 3.1 million people each year dying from high blood glucose each year. (And that’s, of course, more than the 2.4 million yearly deaths that are attributable to overweight or obesity.)

"A lot of people are dying as a result of their blood glucose being elevated even though many may well be below the clinical threshold of what we call diabetes," lead researcher, Dr Majid Ezzati, an associate professor of international health at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, said in an interview with Reuters.

Therefore, as Dr. Ezzati told HealthDayNews.com, these findings indicate that people should consider blood sugar a risk factor beyond the risk for diabetes. In other words, like blood pressure control, lowering blood sugar reduces your risk for heart disease (and other illnesses).

"At all levels of blood glucose, it seems that higher is worse," Dr. Ezzati said. "Most people can benefit from having lower blood glucose, in the same way we think about blood pressure."

Dr. Ezzati said he believes that public people need to learn about the risks of having high blood sugar. (That’s sure what I’m trying to do with this blog and with my upcoming book SUGAR SHOCK!) For instance, public health programs that highlight high blood sugar’s risks sugar are needed just like there are programs spotlighting the dangers of high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

By the way, this research project sounded like an incredibly rigorous and arduous one. Dr. Ezzati and his research team at the Harvard School of Public Health gathered data on deaths in 2001 from a whopping 52 countries to examine the impact of high blood sugar. So you better believe that the scientists were pretty sure about their conclusions before they made them. Just think: These findings are based on data from 52 countries!

Incidentally, as WebMD.com points out, "At 3.16 million annual deaths, high blood sugar joins a nefarious gang of thugs. As an annual cause of death, it’s right up there with smoking (4.8 million deaths) and high cholesterol (3.9 million deaths). And it easily passes overweight/obesity (2.4 million deaths)."

So now I’d like to speak to those of you who regularly consume lots of quickie carbs, don’t exercise, and don’t pay attention to your blood sugar levels:

Please take the conclusions of this research to heart! This is yet another of many medical studies that dramatically show how your sugar habit and subsequent high blood sugar levels could contribute to your early death. I sure do hope that this latest research helps convince you to begin to monitor your intake of these blood-sugar-raising desserts and much-like-sugar carbs.

Want some help kicking or cutting back on sweets and much-like-sugar carbs? Join my free, online KickSugar support group.

Want to learn more about sugar’s many dangers? Pre-order my book SUGAR SHOCK!, which, after 5 long years, comes out next month.