World Diabetes Day creates awareness

The WHO has projected that by 2030, diabetes will be the seventh leading cause of death in the world.

The educational tool allows users to select foods in various categories and calculate the added sugar in relation to the maximum allowed intake. It is very important to detect diabetes at an early stage as this allows us to intervene sooner and prevent further onset of complications.

World Diabetes Day was created by the worldwide Diabetes Federation (IDF) and WHO (World Health Organization) in 1991 to serve as an awareness-raising campaign. Martin says that of those diagnosed with diabetes, 90 to 95-percent have Type 2 and the remaining 5 to 10-percent have Type 1 diabetes.

The alarming diabetes emergency facing the NHS is highlighted by figures showing it has soared by 65% to nearly 3.5million sufferers in 10 years.

Following on from last year’s theme of healthy living, the theme of this year’s event is a healthy breakfast and start to the day. The disease is not completely curable but is controllable to a great extent, opined the experts.

Feebee Cox, aged 43 from Warwick, was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2013. The progression of pre-diabetes to diabetes may be reduced by lifestyle interventions (changes) and by a few medication strategies. Coincidence or not, it’s important to remember that diabetes is a major risk factor for kidney disease.

He said: “We’ve known for a few time that diabetes can be hugely damaging to the blood vessels and, in spite of modern treatments, we are now unable to reverse that damage”.

Diabetes Rotorua chairwoman Karen Reed said the organisation was working hard locally on raising awareness of the support group. “For those people who produce none of their own insulin – as in type 1 of the disease – going without insulin is a death sentence”.

Fact: Studies have shown that eating too much protein, especially animal protein, may actually cause insulin resistance, a key factor in diabetes. Individual sessions help participants learn to make choices to prevent or delay complications, develop the skills needed to control diabetes, improve blood sugar control, use smart nutrition and carbohydrate counting to control blood sugar, and cope and live healthier with diabetes. Information on risk factors, prevention, and taking care of diabetes are all available at the ADA website, www.diabetes.org. Family members can visit the website and urge their relatives and friends to visit their doctor and ask for a test or a referral to a diabetes educator. Limited sugar intake is just okay followed by daily physical activity and healthy lifestyle. Those in their 60s ranked second (26.7 percent), followed by those in their 50s (26.5 percent) and 40s (12.4 percent), showing that most of the diabetes patients were older than middle age.