Diabetes

Diabetes, currently the third leading cause of death in the United States, is a disease in which your body does not produce or properly utilize the insulin necessary for its absorption of glucose (sugar), which then accumulates in your bloodstream until it reaches a dangerously high level.

Many of the elderly develop this disorder as they continue to age, thus creating many health problems in their longevity living.

Essentially, the disease is a disorder of metabolism - the way your body uses digested food for growth and energy.

Digestive juices break down most of the food you eat into a simple sugar known as glucose, which passes into your bloodstream to be available to body cells to use for growth and energy. However, in order for glucose to get into your body cells, insulin must be present. Insulin is a hormone produced by your pancreas, a large gland behind your stomach.

Whenever you eat, your pancreas automatically produces the right amount of insulin to move the glucose from your blood into your cells. Unfortunately, if you are diabetic, either your pancreas produces little or no insulin, or your body cells simply do not respond to the insulin produced.

As a result, glucose builds up in your blood, overflows into your urine, and passes out of your body. Thus, your body loses its main source of fuel even though your blood may contain a large amount of glucose, which then becomes harmful to your body.

Because your pancreas is the next “link” in your digestive system, whatever you eat goes directly to this delicate organ. Instead of digesting food and producing insulin, it now becomes your “shock organ,” causing you numerous health problems.

Diabetes affects different people in different ways, depending on their degree of diabetic complication. It is associated with long-term complications, which affect almost every major part of the body. Diabetes contributes to blindness, heart disease, strokes, kidney failure, amputations, and nerve damage. Uncontrolled it can even complicate pregnancy. Living with diabetes is a life-long health problem.

                                                      Types

There are essentially three types of diabetes.

Insulin-Dependent (type 1 )

Insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) occurs when your pancreas no longer produces any or only very little insulin. Your body’s immune system attacks your insulin-producing pancreas in the form of an autoimmune disease. If you have IDDM, you need daily injections of insulin to survive.

Non-Insulin-Dependent (type 2 )

You may have non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM) type-2 diabetes if your pancreas does not produce enough insulin, or your body is incapable of utilizing the insulin in spite of its efficient production. This is the most common type of diabetes.

Gestational

If you are pregnant, you may have gestational diabetes, which is a temporary condition occurring during pregnancy but with a 40 percent potential to develop into type-2 diabetes later in life.

                                     Symptoms of the disease

Common symptoms include the following:

· Frequent urination irritability
· Changes in appetite
· Weight loss
· Unusual thirst
· Vision problems, such as blurring and spots
· Tiredness or pale skin color
· Numbness or tingling feelings in hands or feet
· Chest pain
· Repeated infection or slow healing of wounds
· Vaginal itching
· Constant headaches

                                        Blood glucose levels

If you are very thirsty, urinate a lot or have blurred vision, your blood glucose may be much too high for you. If your blood glucose stays high too much of the time, you may have heart, eye, foot, kidney, and other related problems.

On the other hand, if your blood glucose is too low, you may become cranky, tired, confused, shaky or sweaty. This condition, known as hypoglycemia, can happen after you have been working hard or exercising.

Whether you have type 1 or type 2 diabetes, what, when, and how much you eat all affect your blood glucose, which is the main sugar found in your blood and which is your body's main source of energy.

Keeping your blood glucose at a healthy level will prevent or slow down your diabetic conditions and problems.

To keep your blood glucose at a healthy level:

· Eat about the same amount of food each day.

· Eat your meals and snacks at about the same time each day.

· Do not skip meals or snacks.

· If you are on medication, take it at the same time each day.

Your blood glucose goes up after you eat. If you eat a big lunch one day and a small lunch the next day, your blood glucose levels may fluctuate too much, and that is not good. Therefore, it is important to keep your blood glucose at a healthy level by eating about the same amount of food at about the same time each day.

                                        Risk factors

Risk factors for type 2 diabetes are increasing age, obesity, and physical inactivity.

Increasing age

You can hardly do anything about your age: you cannot put back the clock, nor can you undo what you may have done to your body. The alternative of growing old is dying young.

Obesity

If you lose weight, you may lose some of your diabetic symptoms.

If you are overweight - most diabetics are - weight loss is normally the first concern because the potential benefits of weight loss are remarkable in improving blood lipids and blood pressure without the use of drugs, which may do more harm than good.

Over-consumption of carbohydrates can add your body weight. Your body uses carbohydrates as fuel; however, if you eat too many carbohydrates, they may be stored as fat in your body. In addition, eating excessive carbohydrates causes an over-release of insulin in your body, signaling it to take in more food (small wonder that insulin is known as the “hunger hormone”) as well as to store the food energy in the form of fat. Too much insulin results in a strong impulse to overeat, a predisposition to weight gain.

As far as your body is concerned, calories are calories. No matter where they come from - whether from fats, carbohydrates or proteins - eating too many calories will make you gain weight. The key is to eat less.

In addition, the popularity of low-fat diet has broader implications for your health. Commercially prepared low-fat foods tend to be rich in highly processed carbohydrates. These low-fat alternatives often contain just as many calories as their full-fat versions. These unhealthy foods may cause big spikes in your blood sugar level. Over time, this can increase your chances of developing heart disease and diabetes.

The overall best way to control your body weight is to detoxify it on a regular basis. The 10 Step Detox Program is a safe and effective nutrition and diet program designed not only to cleanse your body of toxins but also to control your body weight. The Detox Kit contains more than 100 pages of nutritional information, with 10 steps to detoxify your body, hair analysis to find out the extent of your toxicity, pH test strips to determine your body's acid-alkaline level, and vitamins supplements recommended for detoxification. Dr. Janet Starr Hull is a recognized expert on alternative healing through nutrition. This is an excellent book for weight control and management.

Another effective way to detoxify your body is to use the Oriental foot patches, which use all natural ingredients to draw out toxins from your body through your feet while you sleep.

It is also important to overcome your food cravings, in particular your sugar habit, thereby taking control of your weight, an important anti-aging factor in longevity.

Weight Loss may provide the solution to kick your sugar habit for good. It offers excellent and practical advice and tips on curbing your food cravings. Weight control is important anti-aging health management for longevity.

Physical inactivity

What and when you eat depend on how much physical activity you have.
Physical activity should be safe and enjoyable, so talk with your doctor about what types of exercise are right for you. Exercise is an important part of staying healthy and controlling your blood glucose

How does exercise lower your blood glucose levels?

When you workout, your muscles use glycogen - a glucose source stored in muscle tissue - for energy. With prolonged exercise, your muscles take up glucose at an accelerated rate such that it may utilize the glycogen stored in your body. In addition, if you have type 2 diabetes and you are overweight, exercise can help you lose excess body fat, which may in turn decrease your insulin resistance. The blood glucose lowering effect of exercise can last for up to 72 hours after a workout.

It is important to note, however, that exercise can also have a hyper-glycemic (or high blood glucose) effect on some individuals. In particular, long sessions of very strenuous exercise can cause your blood sugars to rise. Always consult your diabetes care provider before starting an exercise program.

Whatever type of exercise you do, you need to remember the following, if you are diabetic:

o Take care of your feet. Make sure your shoes fit properly and your socks stay clean and dry. Check your feet for redness or sores after exercising. Call your doctor if you have sores that do not heal.

o Drink about two cups of water before you exercise, about every twenty minutes or so during and after your exercise, even if you are not thirsty.

o Warm up and cool down for five to ten minutes before and after exercising. For example, walk slowly at first, and then walk faster; finish up by walking slowly again.

o Test your blood sugar before and after exercising. Do not exercise if your fasting blood sugar level (not having eaten any calories in the past eight hours or overnight) is above 300. Eat a small snack if your blood sugar is below 100.

o Know the telltale signs of low blood glucose (hypoglycemia), such as feeling weak or dizzy, over sweating, sudden changes in your heartbeat, or pangs of hunger. If you experience these symptoms, stop exercising and test your blood sugar level.

      The conventional wisdom of treatments through diet

Since there is only control, but no cure, for diabetes, a healthy diet is the best treatment to control insulin in diabetes.

Diabetics are more likely to suffer from heart disease than those without diabetes because of high blood sugar level causing blockages in the arteries. In addition, 80 percent of type 2 diabetes is associated with obesity, which in turn is directly related to the increasing weight and decreasing physical activity of the population.

Accordingly, the American Diabetic Association has recommended a conventional “healthy” high-carbohydrate and low-fat diet. That is, a diet consists of 40 - 60 percent of calories from carbohydrates, 20 percent from proteins and 30 percent or less from fats.

Carbohydrates are present in fruits, vegetables, beans, dairy foods, and starchy foods such as breads and pastas.

· The healthy ways to eat carbohydrates

    Buy whole-grain breads and cereals with no trans-fat. Avoid fried and high-fat starches, such as regular tortilla chips and potato chips, French fries, pastries, or biscuits - they are near junk foods! Use mustard instead of mayonnaise on a sandwich.

· The healthy ways to eat vegetables

   Eat both raw and cooked vegetables with little or no fat, sauces, or dressings. Use a little vinegar or some lemon or lime juice, sprinkled with herbs and spices for seasoning. These flavorings add almost no fat or few calories.

   Steam vegetables using a small amount of water or low-fat broth. Mix in some chopped onion, ginger and garlic.

· The healthy ways to eat fruit

   Eat fresh or dried fruit, but never canned fruit - which is loaded with syrup. Buy smaller pieces of fruit. Eat fruit rather than extracting its juice. If you must drink fruit juice, dilute it with water, and drink in small amount so as not to “suddenly shock” your pancreas. Never drink fruit punch or fruit cocktail.

   Eat high-sugar and high-fat fruit desserts such as apple or cherry pie (not the ones sold at the supermarket) only on very special occasions, and only in moderation, if you must.

· The healthy ways to eat meat

   Buy cuts of organic beef, pork, and lamb with only a little fat on them. Trim off the extra fat. Organic pork is hard to come by - it is best to avoid pork totally.

   Eat organic chicken or turkey without the skin.

   Cook meat in low fat, such as steaming, stir-frying, broiling, and grilling. Avoid deep-frying totally.

   However, before using diet to treat diabetes, your body should be cleansed of toxins from the inside. Fasting is an effective way not only to control your weight but also to detoxify your body. (Read my web page Fasting For Longevity.)

Diet treatment should also focus on balancing the acid-and-alkaline level in the body.

The Acid-Alkaline Diet provides excellent information on how to alkalize your diet. Many experts believe that a balance of acidity and alkalinity, known as your balanced pH level in your body, will make you disease-free, or may even reverse your diabetic conditions.

After the detoxification, your body needs rejuvenation to maintain its acid-alkaline balance, thereby removing some of your diabetic symptoms.

Forever Young offers revolutionary rejuvenation techniques through diet to reverse any disease your body may have, including diabetes. Forever Young provides a wealth of useful information to help you control diabetes.

                                    Foods to avoid

An anti-aging and longevity diet requires you to avoid all sugar and artificial sweeteners, including honey.

Avoid sweets and chocolates, including all sugar-free types. If you must indulge yourself with some chocolates, go for the dark ones, which contain more cocoa and less sugar. Read the labels, and make sure the first-named ingredient is cocoa and not sugar.

Avoid foods which contain significant proportions of ingredients ending in “-ol” or “-ose” - which are only confusing names for sugars!

Always eat only Super Foods.

(Read my web page Healthy Eating For Anti-Aging.)

                                Insulin-control drugs

Your diabetic conditions will not improve until you start treating its causes instead of using drugs to treat its symptoms. (Read my web page Longevity Is Always Drug-Free.)

For every disease, your immune system is stimulated into fighting it. Your body can restore every wound, diseased organ, or damaged cell, but it can do so only if you will stop polluting it with toxins. What you put inside your body is infinitely more important than the symptoms that drugs can fight on the outside.

Diabetes is a degenerative disease of genetics and poor lifestyle. The Oriental dietary approach with supplementary acupuncture treats its causes without using insulin drugs.

As your pancreas improves, your blood sugar levels will drop even though you are injecting the same amount of insulin. If you keep supporting your pancreas, it will eventually recover completely, giving you back your health and freedom from a life of taking insulin shots or drugs.

Generally, there are four classes of insulin-control drugs to reduce levels of glucose in your blood:

· Alpha-glucosidase inhibitors to retard glucose uptake from the intestines

· Biguanides to augment muscular uptake of glucose

· Sulfonylureas to stimulate insulin production by pancreas

· Prandial glucose regulators to stimulate insulin release from pancreas

The first class of drugs slows down the rate at which blood glucose enters your bloodstream, while the second class of drugs takes it out of the bloodstream for storage as glycogen in your muscles. Your body can store only so much glycogen, so other drugs - sulfonylurea and prandial glucose regulators - have to be used to increase the amount of insulin in your blood.

Unfortunately, in the process of removing glucose by means of increasing the amount of insulin, these drugs are also instrumental in inducing weight gain - the exact opposite of what doctors are hoping to achieve.

Sulfonylureas appear to stimulate the secretion of insulin by your pancreas as well as to enhance the sensitivity of your body tissues to insulin. Overall, they are not very effective medications.

After three months of continual treatment at an adequate dosage, sulfonylureas may fail to control blood sugar in about 40 percent of cases.

Furthermore, these drugs generally lose their effectiveness over time. After an initial period of success, these drugs may ultimately fail to produce a positive effect in about 30 percent of cases. The overall success rate of adequate control by long-term use of sulfonylurea is no more than 30 percent at best.

To conclude, medications are an inferior means of controlling your blood sugar levels. There is evidence that drugs to control insulin actually produce harmful long-term side effects. According to a study, the rate of death due to heart attack or stroke was more than twice for the group that used sulfonylureas than that for the group that controlled type 2 diabetes by diet alone. Remember, insulin-control drugs may not be conducive to longevity.

As diets and drugs fail and glycemic control deteriorates, eventually insulin has to be prescribed. Over time, some non-insulin dependent diabetics may end up requiring insulin injections - certainly not a healthy progression as it increases the risk of even more serious disease.

Is it possible to control diabetes without the use of drugs or medications? Absolutely! Especially for those who are borderline cases.

The Natural Diabetes Handbook gives you the power to block, control, and in some cases, even reverse diabetes. Its approach to diabetes is completely natural, such as using vinegar to reduce blood sugar. The Natural Diabetes Handbook is filled with amazing facts and reference guidelines for you lifetime diabetes care and control. The Natural Diabetes Handbook also comes with The Diabetes Recipe Sampler. This is absolutely the book for diabetics! This book provides you with a wealth of information on the disease that is ravaging the lives of millions around the world. Take good care of your diabetes, and live long!

Proper diet, use of anti-aging nutrients, and exercise will improve the vast majority of diabetic conditions to where you may eliminate diabetic medications.

Sadly, most people would still prefer the quick fix or a miracle cure by taking medications to a change in lifestyle. That accounts for the ever-growing number of diabetics.

                               The Oriental approach

According to Western medicine, diabetes is a disease caused by a combination of genetics and poor lifestyle, in which the body does not produce any or adequate insulin. Diabetics in the West may have to take daily insulin injections to control their disorder.

In Chinese medicine, the disorder is known as "wasting-thirst" disorder, "depletion-thirst" disease, or "sugar-urine" illness. It is attributable to a range of factors from eating an excessive amount of fatty or sweet foods to emotional disturbances, and a body constitution that is yin deficient. (For more information on the concept of yin and yang in Chinese medicine, read my book, NO MIRACLE CURES- Only Wholesome Wellness. Also, go to my website Chinese Healing.) The treatment is primarily dietary, with supplementary acupuncture. In many cases, Chinese physicians have produced positive results in treating the disorder without the use of insulin.

Find out more information about acupuncture and the Oriental treatment of diabetes.

After years of excessive eating of refined sugar, fruit, alcohol, dairy products, chemicals, greasy food, and other highly yin substances, your pancreas may have become unduly exhausted, causing failure of your spleen in transporting and transforming, which, in turn, results in accumulation of internal heat as well as depletion of your food and body fluids, finally leading to diabetes. That is why it is called "depletion-thirst" disease. Sugar begins to appear in your urine, your body loses much of its water, and your reserve minerals become depleted as a result.

Essentially, your pancreas loses its ability to produce enough insulin to neutralize excess blood sugar.

In addition, anxiety, anger, mental depression may have injured your liver, causing your liver qi (internal vital energy) to stagnate or weaken. Over time, stagnated liver qi turns into heat, which dries up your body fluids, eventually leading to diabetes. That explains why diabetics are always thirsty.

Furthermore, excessive sexual activities may have caused failure of your kidney qi to maintain the functioning of the bladder in restraining urine discharge, resulting in large quantity of urine.

Deficiency of yin acts as the primary cause, and dryness-heat as the secondary. The more deficient in yin, the more severe dryness-heat will be. Your lungs, stomach, and kidneys are all the organs involved, but predominantly the kidneys.

Physiologically, your lungs are responsible for the coordination of visceral activities and serve as a source of body fluids. Dryness of your lungs not only results in depletion of your body fluids, but also disturbs their coordinating function and fluid distribution, leading to excessive urine and thirst. Excess stomach-fire causes excessive hunger and constipation. Your kidneys control water and store essence and primary yin and yang, so dysfunction of your kidneys may lead to discharge of sweet urine.

In short, a constitution with deficiency of yin, immoderate eating and drinking, emotional upset, overstrain, and sexual indulgence are the major causes of diabetes. A change in lifestyle is called for.

Much of the sugar that enters your bloodstream is originally stored in the liver in the form of glycogen until needed, when it is again converted into glucose. When the amount of glycogen exceeds the livers’ storage capacity, it is released into your bloodstream in the form of fatty acid. The fatty acid is stored initially in the more inactive places of the body, such as your buttocks, thighs, and midsection. Your body shape is often a good indicator of your glycogen level. If you continue to eat refined sugars, the fatty acid will be attracted to more yang organs such as your heart and kidneys, which gradually become encased in a layer of fat and mucus.

To offset these symptoms, modern medicine treats diabetes with artificial injections of insulin. Unfortunately, without a drastic change in lifestyle, there will be no miracle cures for diabetes.

Treating symptoms of diabetes with insulin-control drugs, instead of eradicating its causes with proper nutrition and a healthy lifestyle, is certainly not anti-aging.

Return from Diabetes to Home Page.

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

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