Type 2 diabetes 101

What is diabetes? What can we do to prevent it? These are just a couple of questions that pop into mind when he hear so many warnings about eating foods that contain high levels of sugar. The article will be about diabetes, but spearheading the discussions will be type 2 diabetes. So, basically, this will be a type 2 diabetes 101 attempt.

Again, we ask, what is diabetes? According to the medical literature, diabetes is defined as being a long-term disease triggered by our body’s incapacity of handling glucose, a derivative of sugar found in your blood stream.

According to some statistics, over 28 million Americans suffer from diabetes, specifically, from type 2 diabetes. Numbers role even further, detailing that along those 28 million souls that are incapable of controlling blood sugar, there are almost 89 million who are in what is called prediabetes. What’s the major difference between diabetes and prediabetes? Diabetes is your body’s incapacity of handling glucose. Hence registered glucose levels are very high. In prediabetes, you experience an unusual level of blood glucose, but not enough to be qualified as diabetes.

The cause of diabetes is linked to how your pancreas handles and produces a hormone called insulin. This specific hormone secreted by your pancreas has a vital role because he is capable of turning food into energy. Patient that exhibit the symptoms of type 2 diabetes are capable of secreting insulin but their cells don’t have a clue about what to do with it. AS the disease progress, the incapacity of insulin to trigger glucose metabolisation leads to a buildup of glucose in your body.

Among the leading causes that trigger type 2 diabetes are: genes, obesity and metabolic syndrome (a combo of high blood glucose, extra weight and high levels of cholesterol and triglycerides).

Let’s also introduce something about symptomatology in our type 2 diabetes 101. The typical symptoms associated with diabetes are: polyuria (you tend to urinate more than frequently), polydipsia (excessive drinking) and polyphagia (eating a lot more than usual). On the other hand, type 2 diabetes is associated with polydipsia, polyuria, blurry vision, irritability, a sensation of numbness in your hands or your feet, wounds that won’t close and recurring yeast infections.

What can we do to prevent type 2 diabetes? There are a couple of things that we should keep into mind. First of all, we should exercise more often, because the movement of muscles actually produces insulin. A healthy diet also helps against diabetes (do avoid high carbs, sugary foods and saturated fats). Also, if you are a smoker, than you should think about quitting.

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