How well do you understand diabetes? Most people will recognise the condition’s name and perhaps even understand some of the damage it can do. The issue comes when you start to ask people just how that same damage is done. Contrary to popular opinion it’s not done by blood-sugar itself, the damage is done when our bodies fail to utilise it. This means that the blood-sugar levels spike higher and higher and a diabetics body is unable (for one of two reasons) to make use of it. In a healthy person this blood-sugar is converted into energy by insulin which is then used by most of the cells in the body.
Type two diabetes, which is by far the most common of the conditions, occurs when a patients body becomes resistant to insulin. So the blood-sugar regulating hormone is still produced by the body and still works, just not nearly as well as it once did. This means that blood-sugar levels get higher and higher and the body is incapable of regulating them. Almost three-quarters of type two diabetics are also obese, which is a stark correlation. Of course this doesn’t explain how one-quarter of all type two diabetics contract the condition. What it does do is give some light into how insulin resistance may form. As our bodies get bigger our insulin hormone becomes less capable of filtering the blood-sugar from the blood.
Type one diabetes is very different from type two. It’s caused by what is thought to be a dual reaction, both genetic and environmental. No-one is entirely certain on the direct causes of type one diabetes but it’s a condition you tend to get as a child and much less common than type two diabetes. The condition is an autoimmune disease in which the bodies own immune system kills off the beta cells found in the pancreas. These cells are the body’s only way of producing insulin, without the hormone there’s no way for your body to regulate blood-sugar levels. As such type one diabetics have to take regular injections of insulin to replace what they lack and allow them to regulate their blood-sugar levels.
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