Are you feeling angry or annoyed with your partner? You may want to grab a snack.
A recent study found that low levels of glucose in the blood may increase aggression and anger between spouses.
Why Glucose?
Glucose is fuel for the body, and its levels rise and fall as the body metabolizes meals, especially carbohydrates. The hormones insulin and glucagon help control blood glucose levels.
The brain also consumes a lot of glucose in order to perform certain functions like self-control. As self-control helps restrain aggressive and violent behaviors, it’s suggested that lower glucose and poor glucose metabolism are linked to aggression and violence.
Glucose and Marital Bliss
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences conducted experiments with 107 married couples. They were asked to monitor their glucose levels before breakfast and before bed every day for 21 days.
Researchers gave the couples voodoo dolls and 51 pins each, to track how angry they were with their spouse. Every night before bed, each participant counted how many pins they had stuck in their voodoo doll that day.
After 21 days, researchers brought the couples into a lab where they played a computer game. The couples were split into separate rooms and each time they won, they decided how loud of a noise to blast at their spouse, and for how long. The noise included fingernails scratching a chalkboard, ambulance sirens, and dentist drills.
In reality, participants were playing against a computer game that allowed them to win at least 50% of the time, and the noise was never sent.
However, researchers found that those with lower average levels of evening blood sugar sent louder and longer noises to their spouses, as well as pricked their voodoo dolls with more pins.
Those in the lowest 25th percentile of evening glucose levels stuck twice as many pins in their voodoo dolls than those in the upper 25th percentile on average.
Thus, researchers say don’t have a difficult conversation with your spouse on an empty stomach!
Additional Data
Several other studies have also studied the link between glucose and aggression. A summary of their findings is below.
- Participants who consumed a glucose beverage behaved less aggressively than those who only had a placebo.
- An indirect relationship showed between diabetes and aggressiveness through low self-control.
- States with higher diabetes rates, also had higher violent crime rates.
- Countries with high rates of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency (disorder tied to low glucose levels) had higher killings rates.
If you’re a health care professional, do you talk to patients with diabetes or low glucose levels, about the potential effects on their behavior? Do you think it’s appropriate to discuss if you notice a patient is having behavior issues, especially children, if you know they suffer from low glucose levels? Please join us inside Sermo to discuss further.
Leave a Reply