Smart Blood Sugar

This article contains links that should you click and make a purchase, we may earn a commission from the sale. See our Advertiser Disclosure.

What Is Smart Blood Sugar?

Smart Blood Sugar allegedly helps reverse diabetes by offering a guide to help you make dietary lifestyle choices that avoid harmful blood sugar and insulin levels.

More than ⅓ of the US population has prediabetes, whereas 10.5% have been diagnosed with diabetes. Diabetes carries a physical, emotional, and economic burden that can negatively impact those suffering from the disease, as well as their support network.

Many management options, ranging from medical treatment to lifestyle changes, have been proven effective in the care of diabetes. Smart Blood Sugar represents the latter.

Marlene Merrit is a board-certified Doctor of Oriental Medicine and the person behind Smart Blood Sugar. She claims that her system can help restore the health and vibrancy lost with diabetes.

In fact, according to her website, Smart Blood Sugar is intended to:

• Help you switch your body’s energy sources to utilize “stored energy”
• Minimize spikes in blood sugar and insulin
• Prevent insulin resistance (a condition when your body become unresponsive to insulin)
• Provide strategies to promote energy with healthy food choices

Can Dr. Merrit’s system help control your blood sugar? This review will assess how the product works, its science, safety, and whether it’s worth it for you.

How Does Smart Blood Sugar Work?

Smart Blood Sugar allegedly helps you reverse your diabetes by providing dietary guidelines that allow you to avoid drastic fluctuations in glucose and insulin levels. What exactly is the method behind these results? A high fat, low carbohydrate diet.

Also called a ketogenic diet, Smart Blood Sugar is not a new phenomenon. The principles of this high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet are rooted in basic physiological concepts.

Insulin allows your body to utilize the sugar obtained from the food you consume. What isn’t needed for immediate energy is stored, but space is limited. The excess is converted to fat in the liver.

Some can be stored here, but most are sent off to support the fat deposits located throughout your body. Despite being partially responsible for an expanding waistline, without insulin, glucose would remain in your blood, leading to diabetes, heart disease, or even stroke.

When you avoid carbohydrates, the opposite scenario occurs. Insulin is not needed, so energy stores, i.e. fats, are mobilized to be used as energy.

This is how Smart Blood Sugar is intended to control glucose and insulin levels. Rather than carbohydrates, Smart Blood Sugar provides guidelines for a diet in which healthy fats are the emphasis.

According to Dr. Merritt, the time it takes to reverse diabetes with Smart Blood Sugar varies greatly from person-to-person. Factors contributing to the length of time needed to deliver results may relate to how long you’ve had diabetes and whether or not insulin resistance is present.

Nonetheless, Dr. Merritt claims that, on average, those with diabetes that use her program are free of their medications after 12-18 months.

Is there any research backing her methods? We’ll review what we’ve found in the next section.

The Science Behind the Smart Blood Sugar Method

Again, high fat, low carbohydrate diets are not new. Adopting this meal plan is suspected of offering many benefits above and beyond just regulating blood sugar. Thus, it has been well studied.

In this section, we’ll discuss some of the studies that have investigated the ability of high fat, low carbohydrate diets to improve factors associated with diabetes.

In 2004, a ketogenic diet was compared to a low-fat, low-calorie diet in overweight subjects. Over 24-weeks, researchers found that those adopting the ketogenic diet were more likely to complete the study, lost more weight and fat mass, and also improved triglyceride levels. Keep in mind that subjects also received nutritional supplements and exercise guidance.

The following year, the ketogenic diet was studied in overweight subjects with type 2 diabetes. Over 16-weeks, there was a 16% drop in a lab test used to measure long-term blood sugar control. Also, seven subjects were able to discontinue diabetes medications, while 10 others reduced them. As in the previous study, weight loss and triglycerides were also improved.

A 2012 review of 11 clinical trials examined the use of a low carbohydrate diet in diabetics. Researchers concluded that adopting this dietary style led to better short and long-term glucose control, greater reductions in diabetes medications, and better triglyceride levels when compared to other diets. These results may be left open to interpretation as many studies were small and of short duration. Also, weight loss may have contributed to blood sugar control.

Most recently, the results of 12 studies were used to examine the safety and efficacy of the ketogenic diet in overweight and obese subjects.

They found that this diet was effective for reducing weight, BMI, waist circumference, blood glucose, total cholesterol, and blood pressure. Also, weight loss was sustained up to 2-years later, and the users discontinued the ketogenic diet at a similar rate to that of low-calorie diets.

Is Smart Blood Sugar Safe?

Smart Blood Sugar may provide lifestyle changes necessary for controlling blood sugar, though managing your diabetes without medical guidance can be risky.

Drastically changing your diet by avoiding carbohydrates can result in nutrient, mineral, and energy deficiencies. Adopting this diet while also using anti-diabetic supplements or drugs can be especially dangerous and result in harmful drops in your blood sugar levels.

Signs and symptoms that your blood sugar may be too low can include the following:

• Pale skin
• Sweating
• Hunger and thirst
• Shakes
• Irritability
• Headache
• Dizziness and disorientation
• Confusion
• Slurred speech
• Loss of consciousness

Experiencing these symptoms in the setting of diabetes, a low carbohydrate diet, and diabetic medications likely represent an emergency situation. Seek immediate medical attention.

For these reasons, avoid managing your blood sugar without medical guidance. If you think your levels are too high, speak with your doctor to determine the best plan of action.

The Cost

Smart Blood Sugar is available directly from Dr. Merrit’s website.

The guide usually retails for $67, but it currently costs $27. Additionally, your purchase includes 5 free gifts;

1. 7 Day Meal Plan - diabetes reversal recipes from an expert chef
2. 99 Foods for Diabetics - a list of foods that reduce insulin and lower blood sugar
3. How to Read a Food label - a guide to spotting ingredients that spike blood sugar
4. Carb Count Cheat Sheet - a guide to eating at restaurants
5. Alcohol That Works - a guide to blood sugar - safe cocktails

Also, your purchase is backed by a 60-day guarantee. To process your return, call support during business hours at 888-509-0357, or email them at support@primalhealthlp.com.

After some digging around, we were able to locate Smart Blood Sugar for as low as $9.99 at sites like Nutriclub and Wake Nutra. Though you save money, keep in mind that you may miss out on Dr. Merrit’s guarantee when purchasing through other vendors.

What Are the Alternatives to Smart Blood Sugar?

As the methods used in Smart Blood Sugar are rooted in a ketogenic diet, you can find similar guides from a wide variety of vendors.

There are many ketogenic diet meal plan guides and recipe books on the market. Many of them can be obtained second-hand for just pennies on the dollar, or even for free. While this may allow you to save some money, remember that we do not recommend managing your blood sugar without first speaking with your doctor.

If you’re looking for more hands-on guidance, Jenny Craig and The South Beach Diet both offer meal plans, recipes, prepackaged foods, and expert counseling that can be tailored to those opting for ketogenic diets.

These services can range from $3-$15 per day, so you won’t save in money going for either of these options. However, both Jenny Craig and The South Beach Diet have scientific support for their specific products.

You should similarly speak with a doctor before adopting either plan, but the nutritional support they offer may be a better idea rather than taking on major lifestyle changes without supervision.

The Bottom Line

Smart Blood Sugar is a method of blood sugar control rooted in the principles of the ketogenic diet. The potential benefits that adopting this diet can have on diabetes are well documented.

At HighYa, Smart Blood Sugar garners just 3.1-stars on about 40 reviews. Negative ratings were related to users being unhappy with paying a premium for methods that are available elsewhere at no cost. Also, multiple customers reported being charged monthly fees that they did not initially agree to.

Though Smart Blood Sugar is relatively inexpensive at its current pricing, it seems to provide information that you can obtain for free. When you factor in the potential dangers of managing blood sugar levels without coordinating with your doctor and the reported hidden auto-charges, you may want to seek help elsewhere.

Managing your blood sugar should always begin with speaking to your doctor. While healthy lifestyle changes will inevitably be a large part of your management, it is best to ensure your doctor is aware of any major dietary changes.