In this day and age, everyone has heard of diabetes and most likely, you know someone, or multiple people, who suffer from it. For the most part we know what foods to eat and what foods to avoid, but unfortunately day by day month by month, year by year, it seems we as a society are becoming unhealthier. With all the information we have on proper nutrition, how can this be happening and more importantly, why?
For some people, it can be their environment and the food they have access to. For others, they might be born with it imprinted in our DNA. I have seen diabetes first hand and I myself was diagnosed with it years ago. While I always knew that people suffer with diabetes, it was not until recently that I realized just how deadly diabetes had become.
From 1990 to 2013, there has been an increase of 70% of diabetes cases in the USA. Every 17 seconds someone is diagnosed with diabetes and every 6 seconds, someone dies from the disease. How much longer must this go on before we reverse this epidemic?
Just as food corporations and fast-food chains have exposed their mass produced and heavily processed products to every cornier of the globe, the cases of all types of diabetes have gone off the charts, and this is not a coincidence.
So just what is diabetes and how do we get it? What does it do to our bodies and can we reverse it? There are several types of diabetes; type1, type 2, and prediabetes, some doctors are even calling dementia “type 3 diabetes”. In its simplest form, diabetes is when you have too much sugar in your blood stream (a high blood glucose). The human body takes the carbohydrates that are consumed and breaks it down into sugar (glucose). This glucose then gets into the blood stream and is detected by the brain. The brain then sends a signal to the pancreas to produce insulin, which acts as a key to the cells. Insulin molecules attach to glucose molecules and insulin receptors within the cell recognize the insulin which then allows glucose to pass through and become absorb by cells and become energy. But if you have more sugar in your blood stream than your body needs, insulin can leave surplus glucose, to be stored in the liver for future use. Our bodies will use this surplus for energy during the day when we are not eating. However, when we constantly take in more glucose than our bodies use for fuel, this surplus glucose will end up becoming stored as fat. This is why insulin is so important to our bodies. It helps regulates our blood sugar levels; too little glucose and we loose energy, this called Hypoglycemia. Too much glucose in our blood stream over long periods can cause damage throughout our bodies, this is what’s known as Hyperglycemia and this where diabetes comes into the picture.
In a general sense, diabetes is when the body cant keep up with the demand for more insulin. With type 1 diabetes, the body does not produce enough insulin or no produces none at all. With type 2 diabetes, the insulin is produced by the body but it does not work very well, a characteristic referred to as insulin resistance. In cases of insulin resistance, the body needs to produce more insulin to allow the glucose to get through. Diabetes can cause many complications, such as cataracts, heart attacks, peripheral artery disease, peripheral neuropathy, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, stroke, diabetic neuropathy and diabetic foot. These complications are what is so frightening about diabetes.
Living with diabetes means that you are at risk of losing limbs due to complications, losing your eyesight, or losing your life to a heart attack. For all kinds of diabetes, it comes down to the relationship between blood sugar and insulin. In the next episode, we will take a look at the similarities and important differences between the various types of diabetes and address the question; can diabetes be reversed?