Huffington Post, Mark Hyman.

Great background article on diabetes and how lifestyle changes can reverse and prevent this disease.

Diabetes is not reversible and controlling your blood sugar with drugs or insulin will protect you from organ damage and death. That is what the medical profession would have you believe, but medication and insulin can actually increase your risk getting a heart attack or dying. The diabetes epidemic is accelerating along with the obesity epidemic, and what you are not hearing about is another way to treat it.

Type 2 diabetes, or what was once called adult onset diabetes, is increasing worldwide and now affects nearly 100 million people — and over 20 million Americans.

We are seeing increasing rates of Type 2 diabetes, especially in children, which has increased over 1,000 percent in the last decade and was unknown before this generation. One in three children born today will have diabetes in their lifetime.

Yet this is an entirely preventable lifestyle disease.

In a report in The New England Journal of Medicine, Walter Willett, MD, PhD, and his colleagues from the Harvard School of Public Health demonstrated that 91 percent of all Type 2 diabetes cases could be prevented through improvements lifestyle and diet.

Today, I want to review in detail this new way of thinking about diabetes and outline the tests I recommend to identify problems with blood sugar. Then next week I want to tell you exactly how to prevent, treat, and reverse Type 2 diabetes.

The Road to Diabetes Starts Early

Diabetes is often undiagnosed until its later stages. Insulin resistance, when the body becomes resistant to the effects of insulin, is primarily what causes diabetes.

When your diet is full of empty calories, an abundance of quickly absorbed sugars and carbohydrates (bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, etc.), the body slowly becomes resistant to the effects of insulin and needs more to do the same job of keeping your blood sugar even.

High insulin levels are the first sign of a problem. The high insulin leads to an appetite that is out of control, and increasing weight gain around the belly.

High levels of insulin are warning signs — they precede Type 2 diabetes by decades.

Insulin resistance and the metabolic syndrome associated with it is often accompanied by increasing central obesity, fatigue after meals, sugar cravings, high triglycerides, low HDL, high blood pressure, problems with blood clotting, as well as increased inflammation.

These clues can often be picked up decades before anyone ever gets diabetes — and may help you prevent diabetes entirely.

If you have a family history of obesity (especially around the belly), diabetes, early heart disease, or even dementia you are even more prone to this problem.

Most people know about the common complications of diabetes such as heart attacks, strokes, amputations, blindness, kidney failure, and nerve damage. Some may even know that it increases your risk of dementia and cancers and can cause impotence.

But most people don’t realize that insulin resistance or pre-diabetes can be just as bad causing heart attacks, strokes, dementia, cancer, and impotence — decades before you get diabetes.

In fact many people with pre-diabetes never get diabetes, but they are at severe risk just the same.

Mark Hyman, MD: Are Diabetes And Insulin Resistance Really Reversible?.