Outsmart Diabetes 1-2-3 by Editors of Prevention

Author:Editors of Prevention
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781605298658
Publisher: Rodale
Published: 2009-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

Exercise: The Right Move for Preventing and Controlling Diabetes

Exercise can play a key role in limiting the effect that diabetes will have on your life even before you develop the disease. A landmark 2002 study called the Diabetes Prevention Program highlighted the effects of physical activity in people who were overweight and had a type of prediabetes. The researchers found that people who lost 7 percent of their body weight by improving their diets and exercising 150 minutes a week (that’s just 21/2 hours) lowered their risk of developing diabetes by 58 percent. Others in the study took the blood-sugar-lowering drug metformin twice a day and lowered their risk by a lesser amount—31 percent.

Most people with prediabetes go on to develop diabetes within 10 years if they don’t lose weight with lifestyle changes, according to the National Institutes of Health. They also face a higher risk of heart disease. So if you know that you have prediabetes or other risk factors for developing diabetes, don’t wait until you have the disease to start becoming more active. The health benefits start now!

If you already have diabetes, being more physically active will provide major health benefits, both immediately and over the long term.

YOU’LL GAIN BETTER BLOOD SUGAR CONTROL. An essential problem of diabetes is that your blood glucose is too high. For people with type 1 diabetes, that’s because the pancreas stops making insulin, which must be present in your blood to allow cells in your muscles and other tissues to let in blood glucose for fuel. In type 2 diabetes, your cells become resistant to insulin—they essentially ignore it—and your pancreas pumps out more of the hormone. Eventually, though, it starts producing less and less of it. People with early type 2 diabetes may have 40 percent less glucose uptake into their cells, compared with people without diabetes.

A single session of aerobic exercise—whole-body, heart-pumping activities like biking and walking—can make your body more sensitive to insulin for 24 to 72 hours, depending on the length and intensity of your workout. That’s at least a day for your cells to gobble up more glucose and get it out of your bloodstream, where it may be causing damage to tissues all over your body.

As a result, for type 2 diabetes in particular, exercise is “an absolute necessity” for blood sugar control, Scheiner says. The research backs it up. In one meta-analysis—in which a researcher compiles previous studies to produce a big-picture measurement—people who took part in structured exercise for at least 8 weeks had more than half a percentage point lower A1C, a common test that measures overall blood sugar control over the past few months.

Half a percentage point might not sound like much … until you consider that research has found that each percentage-point reduction in A1C is associated with a 21 percent lower risk of dying from diabetes, 14 percent lower risk of heart attack, and 37 percent lower risk of complications in small blood vessels (the underlying cause of complications such as retina damage in the eyes).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.