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Note: If you prefer reading instead of watching the video, there is a transcription below. 🙂

Introduction

What’s up guys, this is David Hoang coming at you from supplementsuperhero.com. And today I’m going to be answering the basic question, what does A1C mean?

Alright, so this is usually a term that’s used for diabetics or people who are maybe predisposed to diabetes or people who, in general, have high blood sugar.

And I wanted to talk about this because diabetes does run in my family somewhat, particularly on my mom’s side. My mom is diabetic. She has to take insulin shots every day. It really sucks.

So, this is sort of a question that I had a while back and I didn’t really fully understand it until I did a little bit more research into it.

The Defintion

So A1C is short for hemoglobin A1C, or sometimes people call it HBA1C, but it’s very just common for a lot of people to call it just A1C.

And, it’s your average blood sugar reading over a period of time and it’s explained as a percentage. So it’s usually the average over the course of two to three months.

So, again, it’s the average blood sugar indication over the course of about two to three months or so, and usually it’s kind of a better indicator of your overall blood sugar as opposed to the constant fluctuation that you might have with your blood sugars throughout a given day.

Obviously, again, with numbers, everything sort of fluctuates, but this is basically how doctors and labs essentially assess how a diabetic is doing and it helps to assess diabetes in general.

What The Numbers Mean

So, it’s expressed as a percentage. Normally they say somebody who doesn’t have diabetes, your A1C, or HBA1C, should be between 4 to 5.6%.

Somebody who is pre-diabetic is usually between 5.7% to about 6.4%. Okay. So again, if you want to be normal, you want to be less than 5.7%.

If you don’t have diabetes, but you’re on the verge of being diabetic then you’re 5.7% to 6.4%.

And typically you have diabetes if you’re at 6.5% or greater. And ideally if you’re diabetic, they want to have you below 7%. If you’re higher than 7% they want to get you as close to 7% or below as possible.

So, that’s something to keep in mind. I mean if you’re significantly higher than 7%, you want to shoot for close or a little less than that 7%, as much as possible.

The Science Behind A1C

And in case you’re wondering, in terms of what the A1C means, specifically, the exact term itself, 90% of hemoglobin is hemoglobin A. Hemoglobin is the pigment inside our blood cells that carry oxygen. So, that’s what hemoglobin is.

Most of hemoglobin is hemoglobin A and hemoglobin has a variety of components to it. They say about 90% of hemoglobin is just like hemoglobin A itself, but it has these components like A1C…they have a A1A1, they have A1B, they have A1A2, I believe.

And, the part that…the component that glucose attaches to is the hemoglobin A1C. Okay, so they say that the percentage of HBA1C of hemoglobin A, of your hemoglobin A, should be that percentage.

It should be 5.7% or less for normal people. Okay, so for normal people you want to shoot for that. If you’re diabetic, you want to be shooting for less than 7%.

Conclusion

So hopefully that makes sense guys. Yeah, I know I kind of stumbled a little bit because I don’t want to be inaccurate.

I don’t want to say one wrong thing that’s going to mess you guys up. But in any case, I did put a link down below.

The article’s going to go into a little bit more depth and it’s going to explain HBA1C a lot better than I can, but that’s the general overview of what A1C means.

So, let me know if you have any questions down below. Please leave me a comment, even if it’s just to say hi, and thank you so much for watching my channel.

As always, guys, have a fantastic day and Supp It Up.