The month of November honors Diabetes awareness.  Bringing awareness to others about diabetes helps promote education, prevention and disease management.  According to some statistics from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), over 30 million people have diabetes and a quarter of those people don’t know that they have it.  They also state that diabetes is the seventh most common cause of death in the United States.  This month we will take a look at basic information about diabetes, tips to managing diabetes through diet and exercise and additional tips to understanding the disease and management of symptoms.
 
What is diabetes?
The human body is a complex system and one of its systems is how the food we eat is turned into energy that our body then uses.  Diabetes is a disease that affects this process within the body.  This leads to many health problems.  To be more specific, with diabetes, the body has trouble producing or responding to the hormone insulin.  This then affects the carbohydrates and glucose in one’s blood and urine.  Diabetes has several different forms, which include Type 1, Type 2 and Gestational.  Type 1 diabetes is the least common and is currently not preventable.  Type 2 diabetes is the majority of people and there are risk factors that can lead to it.  Gestational diabetes appears when a woman is pregnant.  There are also others that fall into the prediabetes category which includes those that have high blood sugar levels, but they are not high enough to be diagnosed with diabetes.
 
Next, we will look at ways to monitor diabetes and live a healthy lifestyle through managing symptoms.  We will also identify risk factors for diabetes.
 
Source:
https://www.cdc.gov/features/livingwithdiabetes/index.html