The Ups and Downs of Blood Sugar
By Brooke Graboski
Elementary Category (Grades 4-6)
Experiment | Biology
BCVSF Note: The required ethics forms have been submitted for this project.
Hypothesis:
The three types of exercise tested (swimming, running and karate) will lower the subject’s blood sugar, but swimming will lower it the most.
Experiment:
A Freestyle libre device (continuous blood glucose monitors) were used. The device was implanted in the skin for 2 weeks and participants checked their blood sugars with an app on their mobile devices. Participants did one exercise a day; either karate, running or swimming. After 30 minutes of exercise, participants checked their blood glucose to see how much it had dropped.
Control variables:
No exercise (the baseline blood glucose before exercise).
All participants did the same exercise each day for 30 minutes.
Participants were asked not to eat for 30 minutes after exercise.
All subjects were healthy and did not have diabetes.
Variables: type of exercise (karate, running, or swimming).
Participants:
6 subjects completed the study after informed consent was obtained. The subjects ranged in age from 11-55 years.
Results:
All types of exercise dropped the participants blood glucose but swimming dropped it the most.
Conclusion:
Exercise has many benefits such as maintaining a healthy weight, lowering cholesterol and blood pressure, and decreasing the risk of of type 2 diabetes and some types of cancer. It gives you stronger bones and muscles with a lower chance of osteoporosis. Exercise can improve your mood, energy and sleep. Exercise is especially helpful for people with diabetes to help them control their blood sugar. Diabetes can cause health problems such as heart attacks, strokes, blindness, amputations and even early death.
Limitations of study:
It would have been ideal for the participants to exercise the same time each day but it wasn’t convenient for them. It would have been better to have more participants in the study, but the Freestyle libre devices were quite expensive.
