Diabetes May Be Creeping Up on You Traditionally physicians have diagnosed diabetes in people in their fifties and sixties. According to a recent survey, however, the average age of onset in the baby boomer generation is now 37! The crucial point is that whether you get this illness in your thirties or in your fifties, you've been building up to it over decades. Type II diabetes never springs forth out of nowhere. We eat our way toward it, three meals a day, a thousand meals a year, ten thousand meals a decade. Type II diabetes is: • • • •
frequently diet-induced. almost always completely preventable. almost always convertible to a latent condition if caught early enough. virtually always improvable and partially reversible, even late in the illness.
It is only partially reversible because, once you have it, proper eating habits may keep it under control, but such eating habits cannot necessarily heal all the damage that has already occurred. Diabetes is insidious. It exists as pre-diabetes, usually for several decades. It is during this period that a simple glucose-tolerance test (GTT) can establish its presence. Although the ADA currently estimates that one diabetic in three is unaware that he or she has the condition, we find, by doing GTTs on patients with symptoms and/or a family history, approximately three prediabetics for every one with established diabetes.
The Path to Diabetes Let's outline the journey that diabetes typically takes. As you now understand, the modern American diet is grossly tipped toward refined carbohydrates such as sugar and white flour, both of which comprise most junk foods and rank high on the glycemic index. Your caveman body is totally befuddled by such foods. When you eat them, so much blood sugar gets poured into the bloodstream that your pancreas has to pump out insulin as if it were handling an emergency. When you were 18, the superb efficiency of your body may have meant that you hardly noticed any symptoms resulting from this flood of blood sugar and resultant insulin overload. Later the symptoms pile on, just as for many of us the pounds do. You should already have taken the Blood-Sugar Symptom Test and be aware of any blood sugar-related symptoms you might have. The vast majority of overweight people on a high-carbohydrate diet display an extensive range of symptoms, the by-products of unstable blood-sugar levels. A significant number of people who are overweight are insulin resistant. It may be that in most people, insulin resistance precedes hyperinsulinism, but either way, because insulin in not effective in doing its work, the pancreas reacts by pouring forth ever-increasing quantities of insulin. People who are both obese and pre-diabetic often have insulin levels some twenty times higher than the norm. The massive amounts of insulin cause blood sugar to drop to an
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