Blood Sugar Supplements

Carbohydrates from your food are broken down into glucose in the gut. That glucose enters the blood, and insulin from the pancreas directs it to the cells, where it serves as fuel. At any given moment, your entire bloodstream contains about five grams of glucose, a little more than a teaspoon.

What the body does not burn straight away goes to the liver and muscles as glycogen. Roughly a day's supply fits there. If more comes in than that, the rest is converted into fat. If blood sugar drops, on the other hand, the pancreas produces glucagon and the glycogen is released again.

Of everything in this collection, one substance has a health claim in the European register: chromium. The authorised wording states that chromium contributes to the maintenance of normal blood glucose levels.

A claim does not exist independently of its condition. It may only be made if a daily dose provides at least fifteen per cent of the reference intake. For chromium, that reference intake is 40 µg, so the threshold is 6 µg per day. That is the figure to look for on a label.

Besides chromium, you will find substances here for which no authorised claim exists. Alpha-lipoic acid is the largest group among them. It exists in an R-form and an S-form, of which only the R-form occurs naturally in the body. That form is sensitive to heat and moisture and is therefore often stabilised, for example as a sodium salt or micro-encapsulated.

You will also find MCT powders and exogenous ketones. MCTs are medium-chain fatty acids from coconut, with C8 or caprylic acid as the shortest and most widely used. Exogenous ketones supply beta-hydroxybutyric acid directly in salt form. There are also herbal formulas with cinnamon and black cumin, an oyster mushroom extract and a pancreas extract.

The cells that produce insulin and glucagon are not located together but in separate clusters scattered throughout the pancreas. Paul Langerhans described them in 1869 in his doctoral thesis, as a twenty-two-year-old student in Berlin. He did see the cell clusters but did not know what they were for; that only became clear decades later.

A human pancreas contains an estimated one million of them, together making up around one to two per cent of the organ. The alpha cells produce glucagon, the beta cells insulin. In 1893 Édouard Laguesse gave the clusters the name they still bear today.