I wonder if some people can be healthy with higher blood sugar. Like are these average numbers statistically that might not show the entire picture. I have a gene that makes me high risk for high blood sugar but another gene that makes me low risk for diabetes. Weird.....
There are some indications that our current guidelines aren't in line with health, but it's on the other side, unfortunately.
Just like blood pressure, there are studies showing that low normal is significantly better for longevity than high normal, and that if you want to live into your sixties, the guidelines are fine, but if you want to make it to your eighties and nineties, the guidelines aren't strict enough.
If you want to live as long as possible, you keep your weight, blood pressure and sugars all on the low end of normal.
Even still, it's not unusual for a healthy person to live to 100+, but the longest lived diabetic Bob Krause made only 91. His picture is below, and you can see how his skin is getting brown and dead from his proteins glycating.
He was a machine though, he lived as long as he did by not fucking around with his disease. Respect!
He said,
Krause says he's lived a long life because he treats his body like a car, eating only just enough food to fuel the machine. "To keep your diabetes under control, you only eat the food you need to before you have activities to perform," he said. "I eat to keep me alive instead of eating all the time, or for pleasure."
And the former college professor tests his blood up to a dozen times a day, bringing updated charts of his condition to every doctor visit.
When he was younger you had to boil your urine down in a test tube with a tablet and check the colour against a chart to test your sugars. Then you had to sterilize your glass syringes and sharpen the needles on a whetstone before you gave yourself insulin.