PREFACE Diabetes mellitus or diabetes is not just a disease some other person has in America or in the world, for that matter. It is a true epidemic with an incidence in our population that is increasing every day. According to the Diabetes Research Institute, more than 9 percent of us in the United States have diabetes but only 7 percent actually know they have it. It affects adults and children alike and is a major cause of death and disability
in the western world. Diabetes is not just a single disease but, in fact, represents several different conditions that all lead to the same health issues. It is considered a metabolic disease because it affects the metabolism of every cell in your body. Regardless of its underlying cause, all people with diabetes have the end result of having high blood sugar, which means that there are high levels of glucose, the major simple sugar in human cells and tissues, all
throughout the body. Basically, diabetes is a problem where, for several reasons, the insulin in the body, which is the hormone your pancreas produces in response to eating a meal containing sugar, fails to put this sugar into your cells, where it is supposed to be used to provide essential nutrition to the cells. This is a big problem because, regardless of the content of the meal, every nutrient you eat ultimately must be chemically transformed into sugar
for the cell to work properly. If there isn’t enough of this insulin hormone or if it doesn’t work properly, sugar or glucose will not enter the cells and the cells essentially starve, even though there is plenty of glucose available outside the cells. In fact, there is altogether too much glucose everywhere else in your body, which is a source of other problems a diabetic has. Your
blood vessels and nerves do not like so much glucose around so they become damaged—
and sometimes permanently or irreversibly. As you will see in this audiobook, diabetes is usually not a problem of a lack of insulin in
the body nor does it mean the diabetic must take insulin shots for the rest of their lives. Yes, a few people with diabetes have this issue but most do not. Instead, if you could
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