Prediabetes, warning of the of possible onset of diabetes

Equipment used to test insulin levels
Equipment used to test insulin levels (Photo credit: Mykenzie Johnson)

Have you heard of prediabetes?  To be honest, l had not heard of it until now.  However, l am no medical practitioner, I’m just giving you information that l have researched and you can certainly read on your own. So, what really is prediabetes and how does it differ from diabetes?   Prediabetes is a condition where your blood sugar is higher than normal but not high enough to be type 2 diabetes. If it goes unchecked, it could lead to type 2 diabetes it could also lead to heart attack and stroke and other serious complications.

Trinidad and Tobago is included among the countries with the most prevalent and fastest-growing cases of diabetes. The Ministry of Health estimates that the disease affects about 14.5 percent of the population with about 88-90 percent of patients having Type 2 diabetes. Trinidad and Tobago also has a high rate of diabetic complications, with diabetes being a leading cause of blindness. One in three people in the US have prediabetes and, even scarier, a whopping 90 percent of them don’t even know it. How is it possible for half the US population to be prediabetic and not know it? It’s because people aren’t testing for prediabetes.

The two worrisome types of diabetes are diabetes insipidus and diabetes mellitus.  Diabetes insipidus is the type of diabetes that blocks a certain hormone called ADH (antidiuretic hormone) that causes you to dump all your body fluid because that condition is blocking the hormone that controls the retention of urine.  On the other hand, diabetes mellitus causes high levels of sugar in the blood, often spilling over into the kidneys and into the urine and wherever the sugar goes the water will follow.  There’s a whole bunch of prediabetic states― there’s a gradient scale from hardcore diabetes to prediabetes and it happens gradually one step at a time. So many people have prediabetes, and they don’t even know it.

Another prediabetic state is insulin resistance. The hormone insulin helps control the amount of sugar in the blood, but with insulin resistance, the body’s cells don’t respond normally to insulin causing a buildup of glucose in the blood. If left unchecked, this will eventually lead to diabetes. According to medical experts, if you can correct these conditions, you can greatly reduce your chances of getting diabetes.

Here are a few things you can do to reduce your risk of diabetes. Eat as much healthy food as possible, become more physically active on a daily basis is also helpful and may help you to lose some weight, and figure out ways to reduce and manage stress.

Cut out the sugar. You have to start reading labels and choose foods with 0 grams of sugar. This may mean giving up the breads, pasta, alcohol, anything that has added sugar because that’s going to aggravate the problem with insulin.

No snacking between meals even if they’re healthy because snacking does increase insulin and you want to make sure your insulin stays low.

You want to add more fat with your meals. Fat is the only thing that will not trigger insulin too much. Foods like cheese, avocado, olives, peanut butter, in moderation will actually help you to go longer between meals.

Eat less meals! That means if you are not hungry in the morning, skip it, just do two meals, one at 12:00 and the noon and another at 6:00 pm adding more healthy fats as necessary.

Add enough potassium which you will find in your large vegetables like spinach because potassium decreases the need for insulin. Lastly, your B vitamins also reduces insulin.

Diabetes is a debilitating, costly and stressful disease. Untreated or unmanaged, it can lead to several complications including heart disease, amputation, kidney failure and early death.

Family members can help one another in the monitoring and control of blood sugar levels and work together to make necessary lifestyle changes. Family participation and support in the treatment of diabetes is critical to its effective management and ultimately leads to better outcomes for the patient. Don’t be fooled by those “good for you food”, stick with those green leafy veggies.

Subrina Hall-Azih is a Trinidadian Educator residing in New York.

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *