Diabetes Diet: Feel Better, Live Longer

In case you have begun to suffer from diabetes, following a proper diabetes diet is then of utmost importance to you as it will help ensure that you can keep your sugar levels under control. The right diet is in fact the best way of ensuring the proper levels of glucose in the body. Diabetes today is a disease that affects many more people than was the case in the past and if you, as a diabetic, do not control what you eat and drink, you can easily become vulnerable to even more severe consequences.

Chronic Condition

Diabetes is also believed to be a chronic condition and unfortunately there are no known permanent cures for this disease. The only hope for a diabetic is to take good care and follow the recommended treatment and taking a proper diabetes diet will certainly help ensure that you live longer as well as a happier life – in spite of suffering from diabetes.

There is no way other than to follow a good diabetes diet as only the right kind of food intake can help you live longer and ensures that your health does not deteriorate any further. There are in fact also some special kinds of nutritional guidelines that you need to adhere to in order to control your diabetic condition.

A good diabetes diet means, first of all, having plenty of proteins. It is these proteins that will help to supply the body with amino acids that in turn help to repair as well as keep the glucose at proper levels and proteins also contain fewer calories.

The second important aspect to a good diabetes diet is taking enough carbohydrates as it ensures that you will not suffer from ketosis. Also, you also need to totally abstain from taking any foods that contain excess of cholesterol and fats too must be avoided.

Other aspects to a good diabetes diet include taking plenty of fiber in order to reduce the absorption rate of glucose. In addition, the diabetes diet that you follow must not contain potatoes and even sweet potatoes, sugar, jams, glucose, sweets, honey, and jiggery and there should also not be any fried foods consumed. Finally, you also need to avoid fats and oils.

There is also a need for you, if you have become a diabetes patient, to understand exactly why as well as how to begin a diabetes control diet.

The bottom line is that by sticking to the right diabetes diet; it will make you feel better, and also help prevent you from overeating as well as ensures that you will not take to eating foods that are not good for your health.

Go here for more about Diabetes Symptoms and Diabetic Meal Plan

An Overview On The Types of Diabetic Neuropathy

Diabetic neuropathy is a cluster of nerve damage caused by diabetes mellitus. It is a common complication that injures the nerves responsible for your feeling sensation. There are many ways how diabetes damages these nerves, but it all comes down to one reason, a blood glucose level that has been too high for over a long period of time.

Manifestations of the Disease

Diabetic Neuropathy can lead to numbness, weakness and pain in the following area:
Hands
Arms
Feet
Legs
Diabetic Neuropathy: An Overview
It can also occur in any organ system of the body including the cardiovascular system, specifically the heart, the gastrointestinal system and reproductive system. It also appears to be widespread in people who have a hard time controlling their blood sugar levels, people with high blood pressure and high levels of cholesterol, overweight and people over the age of 40.

The Common Types

The types of diabetic neuropathy are as follows:

Peripheral
Autonomic
Proximal
Focal

The most widespread type of diabetic neuropathy is peripheral neuropathy. It is also called as distal symmetric neuropathy; it involves the arms and legs and causes pain or loss of feeling in the toes, feet, legs, hands and arms.

Autonomic Neuropathy is a diabetic neuropathy that is responsible for the changes in digestion, sexual response, bowel and bladder function and perspiration. It also affects the nerves in the heart and control in blood pressure. This can also cause hypoglycemia unawareness wherein the person involved will not experience any warning signs of low blood sugar. With this predicament, a diabetic patient should always see to it that his or her diet is a balanced diet. Not too much or too little sugar is advisable .You can choose dish up a good meal from the thousands of diabetic recipes in the internet.

Proximal Neuropathy can also cause pain in the thighs, hips and buttocks. Usually the pain occurs on one side only. It can also lead to leg weakness and the common treatment for this physical therapy and some medications. The recovery period varies from person to person and the type and degree of the nerve damage.

Focal neuropathy can result in sudden weakness of a specific nerve or a bundle of nerves that causes muscles pain or weakness. Oftentimes it occurs in the head, leg and torso .It can cause eye pain, double vision, Bell’s palsy or paralysis of one side of the face. This type of diabetic neuropathy is oftentimes unpredictable but it is self-limiting and will not cause long-term damage.

Go here for more about Diabetes Symptoms and Diabetic Meal Plan

PreDiabetes Often Leads to Diabetes, But It Doesn’t Have To

Prediabetes is a condition in which the blood glucose levels of a person are higher than normal but not quite high enough for a diagnosis of diabetes. Some doctors and medical journals refer to the condition as impaired fasting glucose (IFG) or impaired glucose tolerance (IGT). Whatever you call it, somewhere between 35 and 54 million Americans in the United States have prediabetes with the number increasing every year.

If you have prediabetes or IFG, you have higher than normal odds of eventually getting diabetes. In fact, it is often a pre-cursor to diabetes as a person nearly always has prediabetes before he gets diabetes. A person with prediabetes is also more prone to developing heart disease and strokes. The good news, however, is that if you have prediabetes and you begin life style changes involving better eating habits and more exercise, you have a good chance of staving off diabetes.

What does prediabetes mean for your body? It’s a sign that the cells in your body are becoming insulin resistant. The body requires insulin in order to change sugar, starches, and other foods into glucose that the body can use. Without insulin, the body is not able to process the sugar leaving it to accumlate in the bloodstream. Before too long the escalating sugar volume results in high blood sugar levels. If the blood sugar level is constantly elevated, odds are that diabetes is present.

The majority of people with prediabetes have no idea that they have it. Because it has no signs, prediabetes has to be tested for. The test simple. It involves measuring the percentage of glucose in the bloodstream. The blood glucose level is tested both before and after eating. A person with normal levels of blood glucose will have results of lower than 100 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dl). A 100-126 mg/dl level of glucose before eating and a 140-199 mg/dl level of glucose after eating, is a sign of prediabetes.

Statistically, some nationalities such as Hispanics, African American, Asian Americans, Inuit, and Native Americans, are at a greater risk of being diagnosed with diabetes than others. Another risk factor is weight. An overweight person has an increased risk of prediabetes. Other risk factors are family history, high blood pressure or hypertension, and elevated levels of triglycerides. Elderly people are more likely to develop the disease as well. If you are near or over the age of 50, you should request that your doctor or health care specialist give you a blood glucose level test. Testing allows those at risk to be identified early enough for something to be done before its too late.

Approximately one out of every four people with prediabetes progresses to diabetes within three to five years. Many of the rest advance to diabetes within ten years. And yet, it’s not inevitable that prediabetes will lead to diabetes. With early intervention and by following an alternative treatment for diabetes you can prevent prediabetes from escalating to full blown diabetes. Many times simple life style changes such as losing weight, eating less processed foods, eating more high glycemic foods, and starting a minimal exercise program are all that is needed to stop the disease from progressing.

The Surprising Link Between Diabetes and Depression

Among the earliest signs of diabets problems is a continuous sensation of feeling fatigued and listless. You may find that you easily become fatigued while doing tasks that used to take no effort whatsoever. In the early stages of a disease, in most cases, the body will give subtle hints like this signaling that something may be not quite right with it.

But even if you see your doctor because you suspect something is wrong, it can still be a shock to be told by your doctor that you have diabetes. You may go through a stage of denial and a stage of anger, but eventually you will come to acceptance of the fact that you do have diabetes.

Diabetes has many physical symptoms but it has a possible emotional one as well. Most people upon learning that they have a serious illness will go through one or more initial bouts of depression. But with diabetes, there seems to be some additional psychological and physical connection to depression. And, over the years researchers have documented a strong linkage between diabetes and depression.

A person diagnosed with diabetes increases the chance that he or she will develop depression by a hundred percent. There have been many peer group studies that show that.  Even taking into account that the psychological stress of learning that someone has diabetes will account for a small amount of the depression, a two fold increase is a huge number.

Current studies have not been able to identify exactly why there should be a linkage between diabetes and depression, but there are a couple of theories that may provide us with a clue.

One theory is simply that people with depression are more likely to develop diabetes. In other words, there is some common metabolic tendency in the bodies of people with depression that puts them at risk for diabetes and vice versa. But there may be a direct dietary causal reason as well. A depressed person, especially one not taking medication for his depression, is not taking care of himself normally. He has a tendency to eat more poorly, especially carbohydrate laden junk foods that have been shown to increase blood sugar levels. A depressed person will also typically exercise less. In combination, these two factors can lead to obesity which can lead to him being diagnosed as a type-2 diabetic.

A second theory is that diabetes itself is the spark. Studies have proven that diabetes causes the body’s sugar levels to vary wildly. Researchers of depression also know that depression is directly related to the body having poor and erratic blood sugar control. Knowing this connection, it would come as no surprise that a high number of diabetes sufferers could also experience depression.

The crucial matter to keep in mind, however, is that many effective treatments exist for both diabetes and depression. Many doctors observe that when treating depressed patients with psychotherapy and/or medication, that their blood sugar levels are also improved. And, even though, its yet to be proven, it’s probably true that successfully treating diabetic patients will simultaneously help with their depression.

Hopefully, realizing that depression is a possible side effect of diabetes will help diabetics to understand better why they are feeling the way they do and encourage them to seek out aid for their possible symptoms of depression as well.

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