The Health Blog

Risks for Diabetes Type 2:

1. Hereditary factors. With type 2 diabetes, there is a very strong family tendency toward the disease. If you have one family member with diabetes, your chances of getting it are twice as high as for an average person with no diabetic relatives. If you have two relatives with diabetes, you have four times the normal likelihood of becoming a diabetic yourself.

2. Overweight. Obesity is linked to many disease. In fact it was said that it is more dangerous than terrorism. When you eat more calories than your body actually needs, those extra calories are stored in the body as fat - regardless of whether the calories came from carbohydrates, proteins or fats.

Remember that insulin works to move not only glucose but also fats into storage. When fat cells are ful, however, they lose some of their ability to respond to insulin, so the pancreas produces more and more insulin in its effort to get the “doors” of the cells to open. Thus the pancreas has to work overtime to cope with the excess calories you eat. Also, the pancreas may eventually suffer from fatigue and lose some of its ability to produce insulin.

If a person already has diabetes somewhere in his family, he must guard extra carefully against becoming overweight.

3. Lack of exercise. For a person to have really good health, two of the most important factors are proper food and regular exercise. Getting regular exercise is one of the best ways of helping to prevent the lifestyle disease such as diabetes, heart attack and stroke.

With so many people getting diabetes nowadays, will you be one of them? Does it matter whether you are rich or poor, thin or fat, old or young? Surely, you can’t catch diabetes from someone who has it - that is it’s not contagious! But how then does a person get diabetes? Does it come from eating too much sugar? And who is likely to get it?

Risks for the two main types of diabetes are quite different. Let’s take a look at the Type I first:

1. Genetic factors:

There are at least two particular genes that give a person the tendency toward developing type I diabetes. They belong to the so-called HLA system, which controls the body’s defenses against infection.

2. Diabetes as an Autoimmune Disease

Many scientists now believe that type I diabetes is the result of the body’s immune system attacking its own insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas.