Pinnock - Diabetes: eat your way to better health

TYPE-1 DIABETES

This is, for the most part, a congenital condition. People are born with it, or it develops in very early childhood (although it does sometimes pop up in adulthood). It is a physical dysfunction of the pancreas that means it is not able to secrete sufficient insulin to keep blood sugar at a safe level. The pancreas is where the hormone insulin is produced. It is the function of insulin to get into the circulation following the consumption of food, to tell the cells of our body that they need to start taking up sugar from the meal to use as energy. There is a two-fold reason for this. Firstly, by telling the cells that there is sugar present, they can take it in and make energy out of it. The second reason is a protective one. Sugar, when it is just in circulation, is potentially very harmful to the body if it is present to excess, so it needs to be shuttled out of the bloodstream when levels get too high. By secreting insulin, we facilitate this. People who have type-1 diabetes have to inject insulin to make up for what their pancreas has become unable to do. Type-1 diabetes arises when the bodys own immune system, for reasons yet unknown, attacks a group of specialised cells in the pancreas known as beta cells. They are the cells that manufacture, store and release insulin when it is needed. As they are damaged by the autoimmune response, they are rendered useless.

TYPE-2 DIABETES

While still an insulin issue, this is a different animal. This version of the disease means that a person cannot secrete enough insulin or and certainly more often that the insulin they do produce doesnt deliver the desired effect. This is really considered to be a lifestyle disease. It is the culmination of a series of events and physiological changes that, aside from a small percentage of hereditary cases, are a result of environmental impacts on body function. By the word environmental, I dont mean exhaust fumes, instead I mean the internal environment of the body. The thing that can be massively and profoundly altered by diet and lifestyle.

To put a perspective on how things have changed here in the UK, 10 years ago the number of people diagnosed with diabetes was 1.4 million. Now we are at three million. For the rates of a disease to double in such a short space of time, something is very wrong. Is it something in the air? Some genetic mutation rearing its head? Increased pollution? Er no! It is the major thing that has become rotten in the modern world: our lifestyle, including what we eat.

Poor diet, high levels of stress and alarming (and increasing) inactivity. That triple whammy cocktail is the catalyst for most of our health woes today. In modern medicine we have, in many ways, become miracle workers. The myriad of infectious illnesses that used to plague us and wipe us out in our 30s are history. If you get hit by a bus, you can get patched up by the best surgical procedures imaginable. If your appendix gets infected, doctors whip it out without so much as a blink. There are drug treatments that can cure, prevent or manage almost everything. With all this, we should be in profound good health. But we are in the midst of a crisis.

Thats because there is one thing modern medicine cannot do: it cannot stop us killing ourselves. This may sound preachy or hyperbolic, but it is most certainly true. When it comes to the modern diseases afflicting us at an alarming rate aside from a very small percentage where heredity is involved we are in the driving seat. We can take small steps that can have a profound impact upon our health in both the short and the long term. Modern medicine has a very poor track record in terms of managing these conditions; the best that can be done is to attempt to manage some of the symptoms or outcomes. But, so far, it does so very poorly.

The biggest public health crises in the modern world really need all of us to do all we can to keep them at bay. We need to understand how our lifestyle influences our health, how it can put us at risk of these big killers and, most importantly of all, what we can start doing today to improve the picture for ourselves.

This book aims to give you the key information surrounding what you can do to help manage your diabetes. This isnt about cures or making false promises. I simply intend to show you what we understand today in regard to the science of nutrition and its relationship to diabetes. I also aim to put that information across in a concise, digestible and most important of all practical and enjoyable format, so you can learn about the condition painlessly. Rather than swamp you with science and leave you blindly stumbling in the wilderness to figure out how to apply it, I have put the information you will learn into the most practical and applicable format of all: food!

One thing I have to admit from the get-go is this: there is a massive slant towards type-2 diabetes in this book. This is for the simple reason that, in terms of the pathology, there is more that we have the potential to control in type-2 diabetes. Type-2 diabetes is a slow, gradual series of changes that result in a dangerous outcome. If we remove some of the factors that are adding to the problem, we can make great positive strides.