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

measure the actual insulin levels in the bloodstream of most diabetics, which is rarely actually done, you would find the insulin level to be too high. How could this actually lead to the same problem of high blood sugar as is the case with diabetics who have no insulin at all?

As it turns out, diabetes is much more complicated than just a lack of insulin. Some diabetics really do not have enough of this hormone, while many others have an altogether different problem that leads to the same result. They instead have what’s called “insulin resistance”, which means that it really doesn’t matter how much insulin there is, the cells of the body do not respond properly to it so the blood sugar rises outside the cells and the cells themselves still starve from a lack of available sugar inside the cell.

In this audiobook, we will talk about the different kinds of diabetes and why they occur.

You should know now, however, that most diabetics are not just suffering from a random disease they inherited or were unlucky enough to catch. Diabetes is essentially a lifestyle disease that only partly has to do with genetics or bad luck. With a lifestyle disease like diabetes, the problem is mostly because of things we do or don’t do in our lives that contribute to getting the disease.

You’ll also find out that diabetes really isn’t a problem of “eating too much sugar”, although that can play a role in the diabetic’s life. It has far more to do with being obese or overweight than anything else. Yes, it basically comes down to the simple problem facing most Americans today and that is that we, as a population, are much too fat. We eat too many calories every day, we eat the wrong foods, and we don’t get enough exercise. This leads to an unhealthy buildup of fat that, for several reasons, leads to this problem of insulin resistance that underlies most cases of diabetes mellitus.

While doctors are learning more about diabetes every day and while there have been many positive research findings that have helped improved the lives of diabetics compared to how things used to be even a few decades ago, they have not yet found anything even close to a cure for this disease. In fact, this may never actually happen because it is nearly impossible to cure what is essentially something related directly to our day-to-day behaviors.

Perhaps the best things doctors have come to learn about most cases of diabetes is who is most at risk for this disease, what things contribute greater to getting it in the highrisk person, what can be done to prevent the disease in the first place, and which new treatments work best to treat the underlying problem of insulin resistance in the diabetic patient.

For those diabetics who truly don’t have enough insulin in their bodies, great strides have been made in how best to regulate blood sugars in these patients, including efforts made by researchers in organ transplant surgery to replace defective pancreatic tissue with transplanted pancreases that can finally make the missing insulin hormone. For these patients, it can be said that their diabetes is effectively cured but, of course, organ transplantation by itself is a risky procedure and is not for everyone.

We will also talk quite a bit about the complications of diabetes, which can happen in anyone with the disease, regardless of what the underlying cause is. While some people can die from having high blood sugar by itself, this is rarely the case for most people. Diabetes is a really bad disease, even if you never suffer from the immediate effects of

high blood sugar. The biggest problem with diabetes is instead the chronic complications of having high blood sugars in the body over several years.

You’ll learn about what happens when high blood sugar is allowed to happen in your body over a long period of time. It damages the nerves of the body, leading to several kinds of related nerve diseases. It destroys the small blood vessels in the body, which makes diabetes a major cause of blindness, kidney disease, and worsened nervous system disease—mostly due to poor circulation to the eyes, kidneys, and nerves. Worse yet, diabetes damages the large vessels of the body, such as those that supply blood to the heart, brain, and extremities. The end result of this complication is stroke, heart attacks, and amputations of the legs from poor circulation, infection, and gangrene.

Hopefully, though, what you’ll get most out of this audiobook is the fact that having diabetes or being at risk for it is not just a matter of helplessness and hopelessness. Many diabetics live long and healthy lives, mostly because they have come to recognize what needs to be done in order to prevent its devastating complications.

The person lucky enough to know they are at risk for diabetes but who do not yet have it can actually find ways to avoid getting it altogether, although it often takes a commitment to a different lifestyle—one that is necessary to stop the metabolic processes happening in the body that will ultimately lead to developing diabetes and to the complications that necessarily arise from having it. If this is you, you should listen even more carefully to everything you hear in this audiobook. Ultimately, the choices you make with regard to your lifestyle will affect your life forever.