SOURCE: Ty McDuffey, Blackdoctors.org
Diabetes is a condition that actually runs in families. It’s genetic and people don’t know that, but it actually runs in the family. If you have diabetes, then someone in your family before you had diabetes, you might not know who they were, but somebody did have it. Diabetes is an inability of the body to keep your blood glucose or blood sugar levels in control under normal levels. Okay. So then the question is, so what is the normal lev- els of blood sugar? And the normal levels of blood sugar are 60 to 100 milli- grams per deciliter. That’s mg/ DL. So 60 to 100 milligrams per deciliter. So what happens is when we eat food, that food is bro- ken down in your body, into carbohydrates, which is your sugars and your starches. Food is broken down into fat and is bro- ken down into proteins.
So in diabetes, there are two types there’s type one, and there’s type two diabetes.With type one diabetes the hormone called insulin which is created by your pancreas just stops being produced and coming out. You just become insulin deficient. That insulin is what gets the blood sugar – when you consume your food, it gets that those carbo- hydrates and the sugar that’s produced – out of the blood and inside the cells of the brain and the heart and your legs and your muscles, all the cells throughout your body… for those cells to work efficiently, it needs glucose. It needs the sugar from the foods that we eat. Type one, patients have to actually inject insulin because their body doesn’t have any.
In type two diabetes your body has plenty of insulin. In fact, your pancreas is working overtime, producing insulin. You have something that we call hyperinsulinemia – high circulating levels of insulin.
