BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND STATISTICS ON DIABETES The simple answer to the question of “what is diabetes” is that it means having high blood sugar or, more specifically, high blood glucose levels in the bloodstream. As you’ll find out, there are several types of sugar you can eat. Fructose, for example, is often called fruit sugar, because this is one of the main simple sugars in fruits. Lactose is generally called milk sugar because this is the sugar you’ll find in milk and other dairy products. Sucrose is table sugar, which is the kind found in most baked sweets and in
the sugar you spoon into your coffee. Regardless of the type of sugar you consume, all of it ultimately gets chemically
transformed into glucose, which is the sugar all of your cells exclusively use as part of their metabolism. Even the fat you and the protein you take in get funneled into the same metabolic pathways within the cell used to make cellular energy. That’s the real goal of cellular metabolism—to provide the necessary nutrients so that the cell can get
the energy necessary to run all cellular processes. Diabetics basically have too much sugar in their bloodstream and in the tissue spaces between the cells and not enough in the cells themselves. This is very bad for the cells, which must then rely on other types of nutrients to make cellular energy in chemical processes that simply aren’t as efficient as they would be if glucose itself was available to the cell instead. This is why some diabetics who haven’t yet been treated sometimes lose weight even though they’ve eaten enough. The body chooses to eat its own tissues in
order to survive because the cells won’t be able to use the available glucose. As we’ve already discussed, there are different types of diabetes that lead to the same high blood sugar problem. We’ll talk more about these later but, for now, let’s summarize the different types, including how they occur and why they cause high blood
sugar. Type 1 diabetes is sometimes called juvenile diabetes because it mainly happens in young people, although it can happen in the older person less commonly. About 1.25
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