Chances are, you either know someone with type 2 diabetes, or you have it yourself.
According to the American Diabetes Association, about 24 million Americans, or about eight percent of the population, have diabetes.
Of this number, about 18 million have been officially diagnosed, and about six million are undiagnosed. Pre-diabetes is estimated to affect about 57 million people in our country alone.
Clearly, this is a common and enormous problem. This condition, which is thought to be a chronic condition that affects the way we metabolize sugar, or glucose, can lead to a wide range of other health problems, including cardiovascular issues, nerve damage, eye issues, and kidney problems.
Before we get into ways that we can prevent type 2 diabetes from happening to us (and yes, there are many things we can do to stay out of these statistics), let’s go over some of the symptoms, and then some of the risk factors.
One thing that makes type 2 diabetes rather insidious as far as health conditions go, is that it can really sneak up on you. Symptoms often develop slowly and gradually, so sometimes you don’t even realize you have a problem until you have a full-blown case as opposed to nipping it in the bud.
One of the most common and well-known symptoms of type 2 diabetes is increased thirst and, as a side effect of that, an increased need to go to the bathroom. For some people, they feel really thirsty all of the time and drink a ton of water and other beverages to try to quench their thirst. For others, it can be more of a dry mouthed or cotton mouthed type of feeling where they just want to sip on extra water throughout the day, but not drink tons of liquid. Either way, the more you drink, the more you piddle.
In addition, some people who are diabetic are hungry all of the time. Because people with diabetes don’t have proper insulin action going on inside their bodies and sugar isn’t going into their cells the way it should, their muscles and organs are often low on energy. So their bodies, realizing something is wrong, send out signals that increase hunger. Interestingly, some people with diabetes lose weight in spite of eating more.
Blurred vision, fatigue, cuts that don’t heal quickly and frequent infections are also typical symptoms of type 2 diabetes, as are areas of darkened skin, often on the neck and/or in the armpits.
As with many health conditions, type 2 diabetes comes complete with many risk factors that can increase the chances that we’ll develop it at some point. As you’ll see, some we really have no control over at all, but there are plenty that we can change. We’ll get into this later on in the second portion of this article as we look at ways to prevent it.
Risk factors that are just sort of inherent in our bodies are family history (you can’t really help it if Mom or Dad had type 2 diabetes), your race (no one really knows why but people of certain ethnic backgrounds are more likely to get it than others), and your age. Also, if you had gestational diabetes while pregnant, and—this one is really interesting to me—if you had a baby weighing more than nine pounds, you run a greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
Risk factors that we can control in most cases are being overweight and/or not exercising very much. As you’ll see in the second part of this article, these are also two of the chief things we can change to decrease our risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
References:
www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/diabetes-statistics
www.mayoclinic.com/health/type-2-diabetes/DS00585
www.medicinenet.com/diabetes_prevention/page5.htm#toch