I am listening again to the fascinating Atilla Rabinowitz podcast. The difference between a fasting glucose of 90 versus 180 is about 5 grams of total glucose in the blood stream. A trivial amount. But the person with the 180 has an all cause mortality risk that is more than double that of the first person. Not to mention an increased risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia etc. Evolutionarily our bodies have evolved to tolerate the maximum safe level of glucose. Which is not something the body did for other metabolites. That is why you do not have other diseases similar to diabetes. But evolution did not build in very many safeguards to allow glucose to safely rise above this maximum safe level. If your glucose levels are elevated, that is the amount of glucose your body is sending to all of the tissues in the body every time the heart beats. But there are a number of things that had gone wrong in the body metabolically that caused this 180 fasting glucose level.
These are not my bright thoughts. These are pretty much direct quotes. They were talking about type two diabetes and not type one diabetes. Now for my bright thoughts. High circulating glucose is clearly detrimental to health if it is a result of metabolic syndrome. If rapamycin artificially raises glucose levels through some sort of starvation mechanism it’s not necessarily as harmful or even harmful. But I am going to be very cognizant of my glucose levels on this drug.
To be clear. They were using the 90/180 example to calculate circulating levels of glucose. When they were talking about safe levels was 100 or less. And when they were talking about harmful levels it was 125 or more.