Who gets Diabetes?

Who gets diabetes? Different forms of the condition can affect people of all ages, from tiny babies up to the very old. It strikes both sexes, but women are more likely to be diabetic than men. Women who have had a lot of children and those who have had unusually large babies (weighing ten pounds or more at birth) seem to face a special risk. People who have relatives with diabetes especially the maturity onset type, have a greater than average chance of developing diabetes themselves.

Diabetes affects all the people of the earth, with one exception: diabetes is extremely rare amoung Eskimos. The Pima and Papago Indians of the sothwestern United States have the highest diabetes rate of all-72 percent. Scientists point to such statistics as evidence for a hereditary susceptibility to diabetes, but some studies make it clear that heredity is not the whole story. The yemenite jews, for example, had an extremely low diabetes rate before they emigrated to Israel, but after years of living in their new homeland, their diabetes rate rose above that of the Israelis who had originally come from Europe. The explanation for the change is apparently one of life-style, and especially of diet. Yemenites in Israel eat a much richer diet than they used to, and use a great deal of table sugar, which was not a part of their diet before.

In general, any diet even a vegetarian diet that results in a gain in weight will increase one’s chances of developing diabetes. A diet that causes weight reduction will decrease one’s chance of deveoping diabetes or, if it is already present, will make it less severe. At least three-quarters of the people who develop diabetes in middle age are overweight. Yet not all or even most overweight people develop diabetes.

My Story of Diabetes

There are a number of myths surrounding diet and diabetes, and much of what is still considered sensible nutritional diabetic advice for diabetes can over the long run be fatal. I know, because it almost cost me my life. I developed diabetes in 1991 at a very young age and for more than two decades I was an ordinary diabetic, dutifully following doctor’s orders and leading the most normal life I could, given the limitations of my diabetic disease.

Over the years, the complications from my diabetes became worse and worse, and like may diabetics in similar circumstances, I faced a very early death. I was still alive, but the quality of my life wasn’t particularly good. I have what is known as type 1 diabetes or insulin dependent, diabetes, which usually begins in childhood (it’s also called juvenile-onset diabetes). Type 1 diabetes must take daily insulin injections just to stay alive.

Years ago in the dark ages of diabetes treatment, most had to sterilize needles and glass syringes by boiling them every day, and use a test tube to test the urine for sugar. Many of the tools the diabetic can take for granted today were scarcely dreamed of back then-there was no such thing as a rapid, finger-stick blood sugar-measuring device, nor disposable insulin syringes. Still, even today parents of Type 1 diabetics have to live with the same fear my parents lived with. For any parent of a type 1 diabetic, this is a real and constant possibility.