Diet and Exercise Can Help Delay Diabetes

Sticking to a healthy diet and exercise plan can prevent or delay the onset of diabetes, an epidemic which affects nearly a quarter billion people worldwide and accounts for 6 percent of all global deaths. Along with diet and exercise, researchers have also found that lifestyle modifications such as drinking less alcohol are also instrumental in delaying the onset of the condition.

Diabetes (types 1 and 2) is characterized by a disordered metabolism and abnormally high blood sugar resulting from insufficient levels of insulin. As a result, diabetics typically exhibit symptoms such as excessive urine production (due to high blood glucose levels), excessive thirst and increased fluid intake (to compensate for the increased urination), blurred vision due to high blood glucose effects on the eye's optics, unexplained weight loss, and lethargy. Too much glucose, or blood sugar, in the blood can cause damage to the eyes and kidneys, and also leads to heart disease, stroke, and limb amputations over the long term.

Researchers at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital and the US Centers for Disease control teamed up to see how encouraging people to change their lifestyles would affect their health over a 20 year period. The researchers followed 577 Chinese adults who were at risk of diabetes and found that only 80 percent of the subjects who changed what they ate and increased their level of exercise had diabetes by the end of the study period, but of those who made no changes, 93 percent had the condition.

Type 2 diabetes, characterized by insulin resistance and/or relative insulin deficiency, accounts for about 90 percent of all diabetes cases and is closely linked to obesity and physical inactivity. Type 1 diabetes is an auto-immune disease often diagnosed at an early age. Diet and exercise reduced the overall incidence of diabetes by about 43 percent over 20 years among study participants. Study researchers believe that group-based interventions promoting lifestyle changes are the most effective way to combat higher rates of diabetes.

Though the researchers did not indicate what specific foods or types of exercise were linked to the overall health improvements, the findings may provide an effective strategy to combat a disease that causes 3 million deaths around the world each year. But as more of the developing world industrializes and begins to adopt a more Western lifestyle, the International Diabetes Federation estimates more than 380 million people will have a form of diabetes by 2025.