Natural Ways To Treat Diabetes
Reduce your blood sugar: You may be able to eliminate type 2 diabetes with exercise and a healthy diet.
By Michael Castleman
February/March 2010
 |
Illustration by Nishan Akgulian
|
Nearly 18 million Americans are now diabetic—triple the 1983 rate. If current trends continue, 37 million American adults will be living with diabetes by the end of 2015. The good news is that type 2 diabetes—the type 95 percent of American diabetics have—can be completely eliminated. In most cases, all it takes is lifestyle adjustments complemented by herbal medicine.
RELATED CONTENT
Modern medicine cures physical aliments, but what about your mind and spirit? Recovering from a t...
Visitors bag their own soup seasoning as they go along....
After surgey steals her memory, a woman learns how to live again through her garden....
Case studies from an herbalists notebook: holistic remedies for menopause....
(Eat To Beat Diabetes.)
Diabetes is two different diseases, both involving the hormone insulin. In type 1, which typically strikes before age 25 and only accounts for about 5 percent of the disease, the pancreas stops producing insulin, which is required to usher blood sugar (glucose) into the body’s cells. Type 1 diabetics must inject insulin. Type 2 diabetes typically develops after age 40, either because the pancreas does not produce enough insulin, or because the cells become “resistant” and can’t use it.
(Controlling Diabetes with Exercise.)
In both types of diabetes, sugar builds up in the blood and causes the blood to become sticky. Eventually, this sticky blood gums up the blood vessels and causes the condition’s complications: cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke); poor wound healing; and problems with the eyes, kidneys, legs, nervous system and sexual organs.
Type 1 diabetes is caused by bad luck. Type 2 is strongly associated with obesity and the lifestyle that causes it: lack of exercise and a diet low in fruits and vegetables, and high in sugar, fat and animal products. As weight increases, the body’s cells become insulin-resistant.
Unlike type 1 diabetes, which has a fairly sudden onset, type 2 develops slowly, over years, as weight rises. Because of its slow development, type 2 diabetes rarely produces dramatic symptoms, and many people with the disease have no idea they have it.
There are other risk factors for type 2 diabetes beyond obesity, but these risk factors are by no means destiny. Even in people with a family history, lifestyle adjustments can prevent the disease or eliminate it. Researchers at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio followed 3,682 people with type 2 diabetes for seven years. During that time, diet modifications, weight loss and exercise allowed 12 percent of them to become nondiabetic, according to a 1998 article in Diabetes Care.