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Diabetes affects more than one in 10 Americans, with the numbers projected to keep climbing. The chronic disease can mean frequent needle jabs to test blood sugar levels—and costly treatments. And there is still no cure in sight.
But recently, researchers have found that a number of lifestyle factors up the odds of getting type 2 diabetes. These factors include obesity, a poor diet, lack of physical activity, cigarettes and too much alcohol.
So, how much can cutting out these vices lower the need for insulin injections in the future? A lot, says a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine. [Jared Reis, et al., "Lifestyle factors and risk for new-onset diabetes: a population-based cohort study"]
Researchers followed the health of more than 200,000 adults aged 50 to 71 over 11 years. The risk of developing diabetes over the study period was about 10 percent for men and 8 percent for women. But each healthful behavior—say, getting plenty of exercise—lowered the risk of developing diabetes by as much as 39 percent in women and 31 percent in men. The trick, of course, is to successfully motivate people to chance their current behavior in order to avoid a diabetic future.
—Katherine Harmon
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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10 Comments
Add CommentHeriditary through offsprings is also a factor to be considered .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHeriditary through generations can also be considered as the factor contributing to diabetes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisObesity factor can be most probably genetically inherited which can lead to lack of physical activity.Obesity also results from long time consumption of alcohol.
i dont think cigarettes and poor diet can be two of the other factors to be considered.
I agree with you. I know a preacher who has never been obese or even fat and neither has any of his family, never drank alcohol, but smokes almost a half pack of cigarettes a day and at 70, is still very active and plays basketball with the church youth and he got type 2 diabetes about 10 years ago.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere has to be something getting into our environment, after WW11, or happening at the doctors office, that is causing diabetes. Some doctors believe, and this goes against their learning, that dairy products and chemical fertilizers, coupled with white processed sugars has a lot to do with developing diabetes. After WW11, our government started pushing dairy products and white processed cane sugar to aid farmers and diabetes started rapidly rising and is now an epidemic. There are children being born with Type 1 diabetes because their parents are still drinking gallons of cows milk and eating pounds of white processed sugar, by encouragement from our government and the news media, and that has affected the immune system and damaged the pancreas. Since the pancreas can't process the cane sugar, it affects the live and the liver cannot process the sugar fast enough and diabetes is the side effect.
15 years ago, they had a product on the market, and sold at health food stores because it was herbal, called Antibetic Pancreas Tonic; made by TriLabs, and it actually restored the delta cells in the pancreas and the beta cells in the liver, or versa - versa. With the liver and pancreas starting to work again diabetes started to decline. Seeing this was cutting into profit, the AMA made TriLabs pull the product from the shelves.
The Antibetic Pancreas Tonic was made from an ancient (2,500 year-old) formula developed by a monk in Turkey to cure his dad of diabetes and it worked. Get TriLabs to give you the formula and you will have a cure for diabetes.
Look around you. Maybe one of 10 people I see is not an outright candidate for diabetes (and often, I'm the one). In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king? (Or something like that.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAdult onset diabetes can be cured, and of course prevented, by adopting a vegan diet. No meat, no dairy, whole grains. French fries and tootsie rolls might be vegan, but they are not part of a vegan diet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is nothing hereditary about type 2 diabetes. Children adopt their parents' eating habits, so it looks hereditary.
The problem with this simple cure is that there is no money in it. Here are two experts on chronic disease and diet. Google them. Caldwell Esselstyn, Jr., MD and Colin Campbell, PhD.
Some progress on a cure for Type 2 diabetes by Professor Roy Taylor at Newcastle University (UK)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.ncl.ac.uk/magres/research/diabetes/reversal.htm and
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/biomedicine/news/newsitem.htm?id=diet-reverses-type-2-diabetes
A hope to cure diabetes: Medicines that fixes the mechanism that triggers the regeneration of beta cells.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGlucose-sensing enzyme in the cells, glucokinase, is the key molecule that triggers the beta cell regeneration.
See this abstract from *Cell Metabolism*
http://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/retrieve/pii/S1550413111000854
i think another factor which must b taken into account is of variations in populations across different regions of the globe... the effect of the above mentioned factors are different in diff populations since the above report only mentions surveys conducted on the american population it cannot be definitive
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOur health is determined less than 35% by our genetics and more that 65% by our choices...lifestyle, diet, exercise, career/job, etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, you are right JWARD, adult onset/type 2 diabetes CAN be cured or better yet, prevented.
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