Health Bits

Prediabetes is a lesser known condition than diabetes, but it requires many of the same lifestyle changes as a diabetes diagnosis itself. It basically means that your body has begun to lose the ability to take sugars into body cells for energy. By the time an individual reaches the level of impairment considered to be diabetes, it is pretty serious.

Prediabetes is less severe, but it tells you that you will develop diabetes if you continue on your current lifestyle path. If your doctor has diagnosed you with prediabetes, consider yourself lucky. If you take prediabetes seriously and make changes in your health habits, you will be able to reverse the trend and avoid eventual diabetes. Make the effort now to avoid even bigger complications in the future!

The first step that you should take is to follow your doctor’s instructions after he or she has diagnosed you with prediabetes. Depending on how close you are to already having diabetes, you may Read the rest of this entry »

If you think that snacking is bad for your health, you may not realize the fantastic health tool that snacking can be. Snacks aren’t all bad. In fact, snacking can be a very good thing to do to maintain a healthy lifestyle and good nutrition. You see, snacks allow us to get a little bit of energy when we start to wear out or lose our focus on our work. Snacking can help us to take away hunger and therefore prevent us from overeating when we eat a proper meal. We tend to eat too much when we are very hungry as we begin a meal. Snacks can help us to avoid extreme hunger that contributes to the problem.

Diabetics have even more reasons to find snacking useful. Snacks are the anecdote to low blood sugar, because as the snack food is digested, our bodies release more sugar into our bloodstream. It is often a smart idea to carry carbohydrate or sugar containing snacks in case of hypoglycemic episodes (low blood sugar). If you begin to feel the symptoms of low blood sugar, such as shaking, weakness, or confusion, or if your routine blood glucose test shows that your blood sugar is lower than is healthy, you will probably need to immediately eat a snack just to provide your body with some sugar rush, to enable your body to function normally with the optimum blood sugar level. Read the rest of this entry »

The health burden caused by diabetes mellitus, known to most simply as diabetes, is growing which is forcing the diabetes community to respond with one of three choices. The first choice is to prevent diabetes, the second is to cure it, and the third is to take care of the people who have it in order to prevent complications which can be devastating. All three approaches are actively being pursued by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the CDC, or Center for Disease Control. The National Institutes of Health is involved especially in doing research of methods to cure both type 1 diabetes, and type 2 diabetes, but they are focusing on type 1 diabetes. Read the rest of this entry »

Being overly fat greatly increases the risk of developing pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes. This, in turn, can lead to other serious medical conditions. Individuals are considered pre-diabetic if they have higher than normal blood sugar levels, but less than type 2. Pre-diabetes often leads to type 2 diabetes.

The human body processes food into energy by converting it into a form of usable sugar called glucose. Glucose is allowed to pass through the cell by way of insulin which is a hormone. Both pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes are disorders of insulin production and metabolism. When someone has diabetes their ability to make insulin is compromised and their blood sugar rises.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the best things you can do for your health is to know how to detect diabetes before it becomes an even bigger problem in your life by not taking care of it. Believe it or not there are quite a few people out there who don’t exactly know what diabetes is. Diabetes is a disorder characterized by hyperglycemia or elevated blood glucose (blood sugar). When the amount of sugar in our blood runs too low or too high it is quite typical for anyone to not feel very well. Diabetes is a term generally used when speaking of a person who has a blood sugar level that is consistently high. Millions of Americans have diabetes; however most of them do not realize it. In the long term diabetes can cause complications concerning the kidneys, eyes, heart, nerves and blood vessels. Read the rest of this entry »