Thursday, March 14, 2013

Diabetes and What to do About It



The risk of developing diabetes is increasing. Americans born in the year 2000 or afterward have more than a one in three chance of developing type 2 diabetes while other areas of the world such as the United Kingdom, China, and the Arab Emirates are also showing increasing cases of diabetes.

The dangers of diabetes include retinopathy and neuropathy with complications of diabetes potentially leading to vascular events such as stroke or myocardial infarctions. Symptoms affecting the daily lives of diabetics include malaise, fatigue, poor wound healing, and sexual dysfunction that all add to the degeneration of the quality of life for diabetics. It is estimated that 65-80 percent of diabetics will die of a cardio-vascular event caused by these complications. 

The good news is that increasing physical activity while maintaining blood pressure, blood glucose levels, and blood lipid levels many of the causative factors for type 2 diabetes can be controlled. Some authors of authoritative literature suggest that exercise, maintaining a healthy waist circumference, maintaining an average body mass index (BMI), avoiding high blood pressure, and staying away from the causative factors of impaired glucose metabolism are critical to warding off type 2 diabetes.

The bottom line is that if you live a healthy lifestyle by eating right, exercising, maintaining a healthy weight, stop smoking, drink in moderation, and get adequate amounts of rest you may never have to deal with type 2 diabetes even if you have a strong family predilection toward developing this condition.

This is an important consideration because you are the example for the rest of your family. If your children see you eating junk food, avoiding exercise, drinking alcohol to excess, and smoking you will be passing these bad habits onto the next generation. Believe it or not, your children do watch what you are doing and mimic those actions. Wouldn’t you rather they adopt healthy lifestyle habits that will help them avoid the ravages of type 2 diabetes instead of suffering this largely preventable disease? 

A huge factor in being able to avoid the agony of diabetes via living a healthy lifestyle by eating right, exercising, maintaining a healthy weight, stop smoking, drink in moderation, and getting adequate amounts of rest may depend on adopting a different view of health and healthcare. In the United States there are basically two different approaches to health and healthcare with the differences becoming more pronounced as time moves forward.

The first approach is the one with the largest number of adherents and is comprised of people willing to take all of the medicine or undergo all of the surgeries the medical community prescribes regardless of how extreme and ill-conceived those ideas become. The other approach is comprised of self-reliant folks who research a subject, seek answers to their questions, and then use logical thinking to arrive at a plan to increase their wellness and fitness by giving their body what it needs to function as it was intended.

The group of people depending on drugs and surgery are meandering down the road to ill health because they will be taking drugs for the rest of their lives instead of giving their body the basic building blocks it needs to thrive. Slowly but surely these people will lose the ability to function in a normal manner and will end up incapable of taking care of their basic needs at an earlier age than if they had cared for their body properly.

Chiropractic is the lone voice of wellness promotion in the current healthcare system that purposefully avoids using drugs and surgery preferring to have spinal adjustments instead of surgery, promoting an active lifestyle as opposed to a sedentary (and often miserable) existence, and espousing proper nutrition instead of consuming junk food.

It is your choice whether you choose the chiropractic lifestyle endorsing health or the medical lifestyle that encourages life-long prescription drug dependency to conquer diabetes.


No comments:

Post a Comment