Diabetes

Odds are that you know someone with diabetes, possibly even someone who has to take insulin each day to manage the disease. Diabetes is a growing health problem in the United States and has risen about six-fold since 1950, now affecting approximately 20.8 million Americans. About one-third of those 20.8 million do not know that they have the disease. Diabetes-related health care costs total nearly $100 billion per year and are increasing. Diabetes contributes to over 200,000 deaths each year.

To understand diabetes, you first need to know about how your body uses a hormone called insulin to handle glucose, a simple sugar that is its main source of energy. In diabetes, something goes wrong in your body so that you do not produce insulin or are not sensitive to it. Therefore, your body produces high levels of blood glucose, which act on many organs to produce the symptoms of the disease.

In this article, we will examine this serious disease. We will look at how your body handles glucose. We'll find out what insulin is and what it does, how the lack of insulin or insulin-insensitivity affects your body functions to produce the symptoms of diabetes, how the disease is currently treated and what future treatments are in store for diabetics.

Since diabetes is a disease that affects your body's ability to use glucose, let's start by looking at what glucose is and how your body controls it. Glucose is a simple sugar that provides energy to all of the cells in your body. The cells take in glucose from the blood and break it down for energy (some cells, like brain cells and red blood cells, rely solely on glucose for fuel). The glucose in the blood comes from the food that you eat.

When you eat food, glucose gets absorbed from your intestines and distributed by the bloodstream to all of the cells in your body. Your body tries to keep a constant supply of glucose for your cells by maintaining a constant glucose concentration in your blood -- otherwise, your cells would have more than enough glucose right after a meal and starve in between meals and overnight. So, when you have an oversupply of glucose, your body stores the excess in the liver and muscles by making glycogen, long chains of glucose. When glucose is in short supply, your body mobilizes glucose from stored glycogen and/or stimulates you to eat food. The key is to maintain a constant blood-glucose level.

So, what happens when you do not eat? In times of fasting, your pancreas releases glucagon so that your body can produce glucose. Glucagon is another protein hormone that is made and secreted by the alpha cells of the pancreatic islets. Glucagon acts on the same cells as insulin, but has the opposite effects:

• Stimulates the liver and muscles to break down stored glycogen (glycogenolysis) and release the glucose

• Stimulates gluconeogenesis in the liver and kidneys

In contrast to insulin, glucagon mobilizes glucose from stores inside your body and increases the concentrations of glucose in the bloodstream -- otherwise, your blood glucose would fall to dangerously low levels.

So how does your body know when to secrete glucagon or insulin? Normally, the levels of insulin and glucagon are counter-balanced in the bloodstream. For example, just after you eat a meal, your body is ready to receive the glucose, fatty acids and amino acids absorbed from the food. The presence of these substances in the intestine stimulates the pancreatic beta cells to release insulin into the blood and inhibit the pancreatic alpha cells from secreting glucagon. The levels of insulin in the blood begin to rise and act on cells (particularly liver, fat and muscle) to absorb the incoming molecules of glucose, fatty acids and amino acids. This action of insulin prevents the blood-glucose concentration (as well as the concentrations of fatty acids and amino acids) from substantially increasing in the bloodstream. In this way, your body maintains a steady blood-glucose concentration in particular.

In contrast, when you are between meals or sleeping, your body is essentially starving. Your cells need supplies of glucose from the blood in order to keep going. During these times, slight drops in blood-sugar levels stimulate glucagon secretion from the pancreatic alpha cells and inhibit insulin secretion from the beta cells. Blood-glucagon levels rise. Glucagon acts on liver, muscle and kidney tissue to mobilize glucose from glycogen or to make glucose that gets released into the blood. This action prevents the blood-glucose concentration from falling drastically.

As you can see, the interplay between insulin and glucagon secretions throughout the day help to keep your blood-glucose concentration constant.

Now that you know the symptoms of diabetes -- high blood glucose, excessive hunger and thirst, frequent urination -- let's look at what happens to your body during diabetes. For the purposes of this discussion, let's suppose that you have undiagnosed, and therefore unmanaged, diabetes.

Now, let's see how the lack of insulin or insulin-resistance affects your body to produce the clinical symptoms and signs of diabetes:

As of now, there is no cure for diabetes; however, the disease can be treated and managed successfully. The key to treating diabetes is to closely monitor and manage your blood-glucose levels through exercise, diet and medications. The exact treatment regime depends on the type of diabetes.

If you have Type 1 diabetes, you lack insulin and must administer it several times each day. Insulin injections are usually timed around meals to cope with the glucose load from digestion. You must monitor your blood-glucose levels several times a day and adjust the amounts of insulin that you inject accordingly. This keeps your blood-glucose concentration from fluctuating wildly.

How to help or reverse Type II Diabetes 

The good news is that most individuals with Type II diabetes are able to reverse or dramatically mitigate their disease with the proper steps.

1. Get Insulin Problems Under Control– Diabetes is triggered by insulin resistance and regaining proper insulin sensitivity can help reverse the process. Limit consumption of sugars, grains and processed carbohydrates and focus on healthy proteins, fats and green veggies.
2. Get Your Fats in Good Balance– Overabundance of Omega-6 fats in the diet is a contributing factor in diabetes. Pay attention to your intake of  Omega-3 and Omega-6 fats and try to get them closer to a 1:1 ratio. For many people, supplementing with a good quality Omega-3 oil can help while dietary adjustments are being made. Avoid Omega-6 seed oils and their sources (these are used at almost every restaurant). Eat fatty fish like salmon and sardines for the Omega-3s.
3. Fix your Gut–  Grains and toxins cause damage to the intestinal lining and facilitate leaky gut syndrome. Depleted beneficial bacteria in the gut caused by poor diet, antibiotic use or being bottle fed as a baby can make the problem worse. Remove the grains, avoid toxins whenever possible and take a high quality probiotic to help the intestines heal. As a note: some people will have continued damage to the gut with exposure to grains, especially gluten, as little as only every 10 days or even every 6 months.
4. Exercise– Even the mainstream medical community recognizes the advantage of exercise, as it increases the muscles ability to use insulin and over time can help fix insulin resistance. All exercise isn’t created equal though and fortunately, smaller amounts of high intensity exercise have been shown to have a better effect on insulin levels (and weight loss) than an hour of daily moderate cardio. According to the Healthy Skeptic: “A pair of studies done at McMaster University found that “6-minutes of pure, hard exercise once a week could be just as effective as an hour of daily moderate activity“, according to the June 6, 2005 CNN article reporting on the study.” I recommend high intensity exercise anyway for its various health advantages, and it is great for diabetes control. too.
5. Lose Excess Weight– Obesity and Diabetes often go hand in hand, and while the debate still rages on if one causes the other, studies show that losing weight can help mitigate diabetes, and also lowers your risk of getting it to begin with. Certain dietary and lifestyle improvements can help you lose weight and are beneficial for diabetes reversal as well.
6. Reduce Stress–  Stress raises cortisol and can lead to hormone imbalance, insulin issues and increases risk for certain types of disease. Work to reduce your sources of stress from lack of sleep, exposure to toxins, mental and emotional sources and poor diet. Getting quality sleep every night can help reduce stress hormone levels and is great for blood sugar.
7. Supplement– Supplements can help your body heal from diabetes, especially while your body works to gain proper insulin reactions again. Supplements often associated with helping diabetes symptoms and improving the disease are cinnamon, omega-3 fatty acids, alpha lipoic acid, chromium, coenzyme Q10, garlic, and magnesium