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.

There are two main types of diabetes mellitus (DM), Type I diabetes (also called insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, IDDM) and Type II diabetes (also called non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus).

Type I diabetes:
It occurs when the insulin-producing cells in the body do not function, and they make little or no insulin. If the body does not even produce insulin, the glucose cannot move into the cells. TO stay alive, the majority of these people will have to depend on insulin injections for the rest of their lives. Type I is much less common form of diabetes - only about 10-20 percent of all diabetics are insulin dependent. This kind of diabetes usually begins in childhood or youth.

Type II diabetes:
It most often begins in overweight adults who are over the age of 40. With Type II diabetes, the pancreas does still produce some insulin. In some cases, the body is simply not making enough insulin. In other cases, however, the body may be making an adequate amount of insulin, but that insulin is no longer effective because the cells’ insulin receptors are jammed. The pancreas may try to remedy the situation by producing more and more insulin. But if the receptors don’t work, even this may not help.