Prevention!

Hello there! When there is a will, there is a way. Lets see what can we do to prevent or fight against Diabetes. Happy reading! :)

 A. PREVENTION OF TYPE 1 DIABETES

Currently there is no way to prevent type 1 diabetes, but ongoing studies are exploring ways to prevent diabetes in those who are most likely to get it. People who have a parent, brother, or sister with type 1 diabetes and are willing to participate in one of these studies should talk with their doctors.

B. PREVENTION OF PRE-DIABETES OR TYPE 2 DIABETES

People with pre-diabetes have glucose levels that are higher than normal but not high enough yet to indicate diabetes. The condition used to be called borderline diabetes. Pre-diabetes can lead to type 2 diabetes. Even if you have risk factors for pre-diabetes, you can still take steps to prevent the disease. And if you already have pre-diabetes, these same steps can keep it from turning into type 2 diabetes which can be attributed to five such factors: excess weight, lack of exercise, a less-than-healthy diet, smoking and abstaining from alcohol. So, here some tips for you guys:

1. Control Your Weight

2. Get Moving—and Turn Off the Television

3. Tune Up Your Diet

• a) Choose whole grains and whole grain products over highly processed carbohydrates.

• b) Skip the sugary drinks, and choose water, coffee, or tea instead.

• c) Choose good fats instead of bad fats.

• d) Limit red meat and avoid processed meat; choose nuts, whole grains, poultry, or fish instead.

4. If You Smoke, Try to Quit

5. Alcohol Now and Then May Help

Excess weight is the single most important cause of type 2 diabetes. Being overweight increases the chances of developing type 2 diabetes seven fold. Being obese makes you 20 to 40 times more likely to develop diabetes than someone with a healthy weight.

Losing weight can help if your weight is above the healthy-weight range. Losing 7 to 10 percent of your current weight can cut your chances of developing type 2 diabetes in half.

Inactivity promotes type 2 diabetes. Working your muscles more often and making them work harder improves their ability to use insulin and absorb glucose. This puts less stress on your insulin-making cells.

Long bouts of hot, sweaty exercise aren’t necessary to reap this benefit. Findings from the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study suggest that walking briskly for a half hour every day reduces the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 30 percent. More recently, The Black Women’s Health Study reported similar diabetes-prevention benefits for brisk walking of more than 5 hours per week. This amount of exercise has a variety of other benefits as well. And even greater cardiovascular and other advantages can be attained by more, and more intense, exercise.

Television-watching appears to be an especially-detrimental form of inactivity: Every two hours you spend watching TV instead of pursuing something more active increases the chances of developing diabetes by 20 percent; it also increases the risk of heart disease (15 percent) and early death (13 percent). The more television people watch, the more likely they are to be overweight or obese, and this seems to explain part of the TV viewing-diabetes link. The unhealthy diet patterns associated with TV watching may also explain some of this relationship.

Four dietary changes can have a big impact on the risk of type 2 diabetes.

There is convincing evidence that diets rich in whole grains protect against diabetes, whereas diets rich in refined carbohydrates lead to increased risk. In the Nurses’ Health Studies I and II, for example, researchers looked at the whole grain consumption of more than 160,000 women whose health and dietary habits were followed for up to 18 years. Women who averaged two to three servings of whole grains a day were 30 percent less likely to have developed type 2 diabetes than those who rarely ate whole grains. When the researchers combined these results with those of several other large studies, they found that eating an extra 2 servings of whole grains a day decreased the risk of type 2 diabetes by 21 percent.

Whole grains don’t contain a magical nutrient that fights diabetes and improves health. It’s the entire package—elements intact and working together—that’s important. The bran and fibre in whole grains make it more difficult for digestive enzymes to break down the starches into glucose. This leads to lower, slower increases in blood sugar and insulin, and a lower glycaemic index. As a result, they stress the body’s insulin-making machinery less, and so may help prevent type 2 diabetes. Whole grains are also rich in essential vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals that may help reduce the risk of diabetes.

In contrast, white bread, white rice, mashed potatoes, donuts, bagels, and many breakfast cereals have what’s called a high glycaemic index and glycaemic load. That means they cause sustained spikes in blood sugar and insulin levels, which in turn may lead to increased diabetes risk.  In China, for example, where white rice is a staple, the Shanghai Women’s Health Study found that women whose diets had the highest glycaemic index had a 21 percent higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, compared to women whose diets had the lowest glycaemic index.  Similar findings were reported in the Black Women’s Health Study.

More recent findings from the Nurses Health Studies I and II and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study suggest that swapping whole grains for white rice could help lower diabetes risk: Researchers found that women and men who ate the most white rice—five or more servings a week—had a 17 percent higher risk of diabetes than those who ate white rice less than one time a month. People who ate the most brown rice—two or more servings a week—had an 11 percent lower risk of diabetes than those who rarely ate brown rice. Researchers estimate that swapping whole grains in place of even some white rice could lower diabetes risk by 36 percent.

Like refined grains, sugary beverages have a high glycaemic load, and drinking more of this sugary stuff is associated with increased risk of diabetes. In the Nurses’ Health Study II, women who drank one or more sugar-sweetened beverages per day had an 83 percent higher risk of type 2 diabetes, compared to women who drank less than one sugar-sweetened beverage per month.

Combining the Nurses’ Health Study results with those from seven other studies found a similar link between sugary beverage consumption and type 2 diabetes: For every additional 12-ounce serving of sugary beverage that people drank each day, their risk of type 2 diabetes rose 25 percent. Studies also suggest that fruit drinks— Kool Aid, fortified fruit drinks, or juices—are not the healthy choice that food advertisements often portray them to be: Women in the Black Women’s Health study who drank two or more servings of fruit drinks a day had a 31 percent higher risk of type 2 diabetes, compared to women who drank less than one serving a month.

How do sugary drinks lead to this increased risk? Weight gain may explain the link: In both the Nurses’ Health Study II and the Black Women’s Health Study, women who increased their consumption of sugary drinks gained more weight than women who cut back on sugary drinks. Several studies show that children and adults who drink soda or other sugar-sweetened beverages are more likely to gain weight than those who don’t, and that switching from these to water or unsweetened beverages can reduce weight. Even so, however, weight gain caused by sugary drinks may not completely explain the increased diabetes risk.  There is mounting evidence that sugary drinks contribute to chronic inflammation, high triglycerides, decreased “good” (HDL) cholesterol, and increased insulin resistance, all of which are risk factors for diabetes.

What to drink in place of the sugary stuff? Water is an excellent choice. Coffee and tea are also good calorie-free substitutes for sugared beverages (as long as you don’t load them up with sugar and cream). And there’s convincing evidence that coffee may help protect against diabetes; emerging research suggests that tea may hold diabetes-prevention benefits as well, but more research is needed.

There’s been some controversy over whether artificially sweetened beverages are beneficial for weight control and, by extension, diabetes prevention. Some studies have found that people who regularly drink diet beverages have a higher risk of diabetes than people who rarely drink such beverages, but there could be another explanation for those findings: People often start drinking diet beverages because they have a weight problem or have a family history of diabetes; studies that don’t adequately account for these other factors may make it wrongly appear as though the diet soda led to the increased diabetes risk. A recent long-term analysis on data from 40,000 men in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study finds that drinking one 12-ounce serving of diet soda a day does not appear to increase diabetes risk. So in moderation, diet beverages can be a good sugary-drink alternative.

The types of fats in your diet can also affect the development of diabetes. Good fats, such as the polyunsaturated fats found in liquid vegetable oils, nuts, and seeds can help ward off type 2 diabetes. Trans fats do just the opposite. These bad fats are found in many margarines, packaged baked goods, fried foods in most fast-food restaurants, and any product that lists “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil” on the label. Eating polyunsaturated fats from fish—also known as “long chain omega 3” or “marine omega 3” fats—does not protect against diabetes, even though there is much evidence that these marine omega 3 fats help prevent heart disease. If you already have diabetes, eating fish can help protect you against a heart attack or dying from heart disease.

The evidence is growing stronger that eating red meat (beef, pork, lamb) and processed red meat (bacon, hot dogs, deli meats) increases the risk of diabetes, even among people who consume only small amounts. The latest support comes from a “meta-analysis,” or statistical summary, that combined findings from the long-running Nurses’ Health Study I and II and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study with those of six other long-term studies. The researchers looked at data from roughly 440,000 people, about 28,000 of whom developed diabetes during the course of the study. They found that eating just one daily 3-ounce serving of red meat—say, a steak that’s about the size of a deck of cards—increased the risk of type 2 diabetes by 20 percent. Eating even smaller amounts of processed red meat each day—just two slices of bacon, one hot dog, or the like—increased diabetes risk by 51 percent.

The good news from this study: Swapping out red meat or processed red meat for a healthier protein source, such as nuts, low-fat dairy, poultry, or fish, or for whole grains lowered diabetes risk by up to 35 percent. Not surprisingly, the greatest reductions in risk came from ditching processed red meat.

Add type 2 diabetes to the long list of health problems linked with smoking. Smokers are roughly 50 percent more likely to develop diabetes than non-smokers, and heavy smokers have an even higher risk.

A growing body of evidence links moderate alcohol consumption with reduced risk of heart disease. The same may be true for type 2 diabetes. Moderate amounts of alcohol—up to a drink a day for women, up to two drinks a day for men—increases the efficiency of insulin at getting glucose inside cells. And some studies indicate that moderate alcohol consumption decreases the risk of type 2 diabetes. If you already drink alcohol, the key is to keep your consumption in the moderate range, as higher amounts of alcohol could increase diabetes risk. If you don’t drink alcohol, there’s no need to start—you can get the same benefits by losing weight, exercising more, and changing your eating patterns.

C. PREVENTION OF GESTATIONAL DIABETES

In some women, gestational diabetes cannot be prevented. But you may be able to lower your chance of getting gestational diabetes by staying at a healthy weight and not gaining too much weight during pregnancy. Regular exercise can also help keep your blood sugar level within a target range and prevent gestational diabetes.

If you have had gestational diabetes, you are at risk for having it again in a future pregnancy. You are also at risk for type 2 diabetes, a permanent type of diabetes. One of the best ways to prevent developing gestational diabetes again is to stay at a healthy weight.

If you have had gestational diabetes, avoid medicines that increase insulin resistance, such as nicotinic acid and glucocorticoid medicines (for example, prednisone and dexamethasone).

GOOD LUCK.