Can diabetes be prevented?

Welcome to HealingWell, kc27. Do you have diabetes? Can you please post links to those studies that you read so we can read them and know the sources?

Of course diabetes can be prevented, or at least postponed if you are already prediabetic. I am prediabetic and for the past 5-6 years have measured my fasting glucose level first thing every morning. I take several supplements including curcumin and a good multivite with 200 mcg of chromium nicotinate along with extra magnesium.

The most important factor is monitoring my diet. One glass of soda or some high fructose corn syrup candy will elevate my FGL to over 100 for days. But moderate amounts of chocolate seem to be OK. There is no doubt in my mind that I would be diabetic already if I did not watch my diet.

I know we can do a lot to postpone or slow the disease we call diabetes. But our genetics will fight us every inch of the way. So instead of letting our genes win the battle we have to use our brains to reason that we must eat right and exercise to slow the progress. Unfortunately, our bodies age and it becomes harder to fight the genes that control other parts of our body and cause the blood glucose readings to go up...especially the overnight fasting ones! (Dang!)

I do genealogical research. One year before I was diagnosed with type II, I found a death certificate for a great-grandfather that I had not known at all. The reason for his death was complications of sugar diabetes. It really surprised everyone in the family, but we could look back and see the retention of fat in the abdomen in all his children, the heart disease and what the medical community now knows as PAD in the legs and neuropathy in their hands and feet. Only type I diabetes was known generations ago so he was not diagnosed until his pancreas burned out. And there wasn't much they could anyway.

Five years after I got my diagnoses my Mom was diagnosed with type II and just last year my sister. So yes genes do play a definite part. But with diet and exercise we can slow the progress. And with the oral medications now available to us, we can try to arrest the disease and keep the numbers low enough to try to prevent complications.

But - no - it cannot be cured until medicine advances enough to understand which gene to "correct" or to learn even what causes it in the first place.

Lanie, I admire you so for preaching diet and exercise. I admire you even more for admitting that you too were going to begin an oral medication. This lets people know they will have to keep working on it every day and every bite they put in their mouth.

I too held my diabetes at bay with diet and exercise for 9 years. But last year I had to start oral medication like you have had to. I am just thankful that we have a disease that can be controlled. Even though we have not advanced to "the cure", just four generations ago there no hope.

And with all the medical break throughs that are coming, there is hope.
Thanks for letting me sound off. Jeannie

As I've written before in here, diabetes type 2 is on my mom's side: my grandmother, my mom, me, my brother and my sister (who is in denial - sorry, but this is true ). Although we women have the same body type (roundish especially in middle age), my brother has always been of normal weight. There must be something written in our genetic code.

I don't know if the medical field knows any more now than years ago about the cause of type 1. If you search online about 'causes', you'll find anecdotal references about lack of vitamin D, northern latitudes, genetic inheritance, and so on.

Well, "cure". That's the point.