Not to state the obvious, but diabetes is a clear threat to the human species and needs to be addressed. It is also important to remind ourselves of the things we can do in life to avoid the epidemic. Multiple lifestyle factors such as obesity and alcohol consumption increase a person’s risk of diabetes, and once again new research suggests that a person’s odds of developing the disease may decrease for each positive lifestyle change they make.
Diabetes is a lifelong (chronic) disease in which there are high levels of sugar in the blood.
Researchers, who surveyed about 200,000 people, say diabetes risk can be reduced by 31% for men and 39% for women for each positive lifestyle change, such as quitting smoking or regularly exercising. Also, alcohol use should not exceed one drink daily for women and two drinks daily for men. That’s a start.
People who manage to make improvements in all five risk areas may be able to reduce their risk by about 80%, according to the study. It is known that lifestyle improvements may delay or prevent the disease, the study says, but it’s less clear how making multiple changes might affect risk.
The scientists surveyed more than 114,996 men and nearly 92,483 women between the ages of 50 and 71 who had no evidence of heart disease, cancer, or diabetes at the start of the study. Between 1995 and 1996, demographic information was recorded, along with lifestyle factors that increase diabetes risk.
Ten years later, the participants were surveyed again to determine which ones had been diagnosed with diabetes by a doctor. During that time, 10% of men and 7.5% of women had been diagnosed.
The study also indicates that being overweight or obese is the strongest lifestyle risk factor of the five studied, but that people who already are overweight may still be able to reduce their risk by assuming low-risk lifestyle behaviors.
People with a family history of diabetes who adopted healthy behaviors such as healthy eating, moderation in drinking and regular exercise were at lower risk of developing the disease, according to a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Experts said normal-weight and healthy men and women were 72% and 84% less likely to develop the disease, respectively, compared with their overweight counterparts who smoked, drank heavily and did not exercise.
What kind of exercise is best though? Data on 123 middle-aged and older adults with type 2 diabetes found that those who added yoga classes to standard diabetes care for three months lost a small amount of weight and had stable blood glucose levels compared with the nonpracticing group, whose blood glucose levels rose. However, the findings in Diabetes Care do not suggest that yoga should replace other forms of exercise in patients with the disease, researchers said.
The two main kinds of diabetes, type 1 and type 2, are quite different in origin, although people with both diseases face the same challenge: keeping blood glucose in a healthy range. Type 1 is an autoimmune disease, in which the body attacks its own cells, destroying the cells in the pancreas that make insulin. In type 2, the pancreas makes at least some insulin, but the body is unable to use it properly. Both diseases have significant genetic origins in addition to environmental influences. But a cure for people with type 1 might not stop type 2, and vice versa.
Type 2 diabetes is far more common than type 1, affecting more than 90% of the nearly 26 million people with diabetes in the United States alone. Unlike type 1, type 2 can sometimes be prevented or at least delayed through healthy eating, exercise, and weight loss. If public-health campaigns to curb the obesity epidemic are successful, the number of people with type 2 could shrink. Significant weight loss can put type 2 into remission but may not be a permanent solution.
A true cure for type 2 would have to deal with two facets of the disease: insulin resistance and inadequate insulin production. Getting damaged pancreatic cells to regenerate could help with insulin production, but the body’s resistance to insulin is less well understood and may be the more difficult problem to solve.
Written by Sy Kraft