The Consequences of Diabetes If you have been diagnosed with diabetes or that you are in a pre-diabetic state, it is very disconcerting. It is all is new to you and you have heard frightening stories about diabetes. Well, those horror stories are a fact for people who cannot afford medication or who do not take the condition seriously. Organ failure, blindness and amputations are the natural result of diabetes unless it is treated. The first step after being warned of the disease is to learn as much concerning it as you can. What it can do to you; how you can recognize the indications and what you can do to avoid the traditional consequences of being diabetic. The consequences that have befallen diabetics for thousands of years. It takes more thought, preparation and work to live with a disease than it does to live without one. That is logical, but your life changes when you are given the news and you have to decide whether to fight it or roll over. 'Fighting it' frequently means no more than living sensibly, maybe for the first time in your life. It involves taking the time to eat sensibly and not grab a chocolate bar or junk food. It might even mean learning to cook sensibly, if you never bothered before. It will mean re-evaluating your life and deciding whether you would like to carry on. However, if you decide to 'carry on', your old lifestyle will be closed to you, because that would mean certain death. If you decide on 'life', then it involves a modification of lifestyle and that 'new' lifestyle is close to what you ought to have been following all your life, which is quite ironic. It will have taken you getting a life-threatening disease to do what you ought to have been doing anyway. However, you will end up healthier than you were, which sounds ironic as well. In short, your illness, diabetes (mellitus) will force you to live a healthy life or die. This is the body's ultimate course of action of having its own way. Ultimately, people do not die of diabetes. It is comparable to AIDS in that respect people do not die of AIDS. They die in both cases of complications caused by or as a result of diabetes or AIDS. Some of these complications are: Heart disease and stroke: diabetics have more risk of heart disease and a stroke because their blood, if unregulated, is thicker (with the extra sugar/glucose) and does not penetrate into the smaller blood vessels. Kidney disease is a major hazard, but one which can be avoided, like most other health issues.
Vision issues, like cataracts are very common in cases of untreated diabetes. Many diabetics used to go blind as a matter of course. Amputations were fairly common as well, because the thicker blood cannot reach the extremities which tend to have thinner blood vessels, They die, resulting in gangrene. All of these complications can be avoided by doing what your medical doctortells you, even though lifestyle changes are the hardest to {implement Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on a variety of subjects, and is now concerned with How to Cook for Diabetics. If you would like to know more, please visit our web site at Cookbooks For Diabetics.