There are many mistruths that swirl about diabetes, especially Type 2. These myths range from what the condition actually is to what causes it to how to treat it. Diabetes is a condition that needs to be taken seriously, but you need to know the facts about the condition in order to know how to manage it.
One of the lies often spread about Type 2 diabetes is that it has a singular, distinctive cause. It’s been said repeatedly by those who don’t understand the disease that the root cause for why people develop it is due to a consumption of sugar that’s too much for the body to handle.
This leads to another mistruth that people who have diabetes aren’t supposed to consume any sugar at all or that if they eliminate sugar, their condition will reverse itself. If a diabetic were to abstain from eating any sugar, that would mean not eating fruit, since it contains natural sugar.
Studies have proven that eating sugar, even consuming a lot of foods that are sugary, does not cause diabetes to develop by itself. Type 2 diabetes can develop as a result of a person’s family medical history.
You can be predisposed to develop the disease simply based on whether or not your immediate relatives had it. Diabetes can also be caused by how a person lives. People who are overweight, carry a lot of weight around the abdomen, consistently eat more food than they need and don’t exercise are more likely to end up with diabetes.
But just because someone is overweight is not an automatic precursor for developing the disease. If there’s no family history of it, an overweight, non-exercising person is less likely to end up with diabetes than a slender person who exercises but has a strong family history of the disease.
What About Sweets?
The candy bar is a fast acting glucose process, while the whole grains are a slow acting one. Another mistruth about the disease is that it’s a minor health issue. It’s a serious disease that can lead to heart issues such as a heart attack or stroke.
It can cause kidney disease leading to dialysis. It can cause blindness, rashes, slow healing wounds, greater risks of inflammation and infection, and neuropathy – which in some cases can lead to amputation.
A lie going around about diabetes is that you will have classic symptoms such as excessive thirst or frequent urination. But most people rarely experience those symptoms because it depends on the level of their glucose.
Take Care Of Your Glucose Levels
You can have high glucose levels, but not high enough to cause those symptoms – and still have the disease. What you want to watch for is anything that’s unusual or different from your normal.
Pay attention to how long it takes your body to heal after a cut or if your arm and fingers go numb. You may notice this right after waking and dismiss it as having slept wrong. Numbness of a single finger or numbness of the lips can be an early symptom of the disease. So can blurry vision and fatigue. Headaches can occur, but these are usually linked to high as well as low glucose numbers.