Diabetes

What is Type 2 Diabetes?

Type 2 Diabetes is a condition that affects the way your body metabolizes glucose, a simple blood sugar that serves as an important source of fuel for your body. Every time you eat, your body’s digestive process converts some of your food into glucose. This additional glucose enters your bloodstream. The hormone, insulin, which is made in the pancreas, is then released to transport the extra blood glucose into your cells to be used for energy creation.

With Type 2 Diabetes, your body either resists the effects of insulin — a hormone that regulates the movement of sugar into your cells — or doesn’t produce enough insulin to maintain a normal glucose level.

How Does Someone Develop Diabetes?

It is estimated that diabetes impacts over 25.8 million children and adults in the United States (approximately 8.3% of the population). There are many factors that lead to the development of Type 2 Diabetes, and there appears to be a genetic component that plays a role, though how much is unclear. The most common causes, however, are obesity, poor diet, insufficient exercise, and hormonal imbalances.

Unhealthy hormone function can set a pattern in motion, beginning with cravings that create a poor diet, lack of energy that reduces the motivation to exercise, and sets a body up for weight gain, stress, and depression, that leads down the road to diabetes.

What Are The Effects of Diabetes on The Body?

Diabetes can have a devastating effect on the body, causing long term damage to eyesight, the heart, kidneys, digestive system, and nerves, as well as increasing instances of high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and shortened lifespan.

It is not uncommon to hear about long-suffering diabetics losing some or all of a foot. Damage to the nerves between your brain and lower limbs worsens, your muscle tone slackens and the shape of your foot changes. One wrong step or pebble in your shoe can cause a small ulcer; numbness in the extremities means you may not notice it, and poor circulation from damaged blood vessels slows healing, resulting in a rampant infection that spreads to the bone. People with diabetes undergo about 73,000 lower-limb amputations per year, and about 60% of amputations overall are in people with diabetes.

Can’t I Control Diabetes With Medication?

People diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes are then prescribed medications that they are told they will now be dependent on for the rest of their lives. It’s bad enough you have to look forward to an eternity of popping pills or stabbing yourself with needles, but the side effects of these drugs can be as horrible as the disease they are supposed to be managing. Managing, not treating. None of these drugs actually treat the condition.

Some cause a dramatic increase in the risk of heart attack, and cardiovascular death. More than 80,000 diabetics have suffered from strokes, heart failure or other complications including lethal heart attacks before use of the drug Avandia was restricted in the U.S. Metformin can cause kidney problems, heart problems, liver problems, anemia and hypoglycemia.

Can Type 2 Diabetes be Reversed?

Yes, but getting to the underlying causes of Type II Diabetes is the real focus. Medications and insulin only address a patient’s symptoms, which distracts from the true problems a diabetic may be facing. Commitment to a lifestyle change is required to send this deadly disease packing, and get you back on the road to good health.

Ready to learn how to avoid or reverse Type 2 Diabetes?

We give regular talks on the causes and effects of Diabetes and what you can do about it.

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