Understanding Diabetes Essay -- Disease Health Diabetes Essays Papers

Understanding DiabetesMillions of people throughout the United States are affected by diabetes. It is considered to be one of the leading causes of death. But what exactly is it? What are the symptoms and how do we prevent it? The goal of this essay is for you to understand the answers to these questions, and be able to apply your newly gained knowledge to your own life, hopefully decreasing your risk of growing diabetes.To understand what diabetes is, you must first have an understanding of the processes that your body goes through to maintain a healthy blood sugar level. After eating a meal glucose, or simple sugar, is released into you blood. Your blood sugar level rises, which alerts your pancreas to release a hormone called insulin. Insulin is what tells your cells to take the glucose and use it for either energy or change over it to glycogen. Glycogen is the stored form of glucose, which is later broken back down to glucose as your body needs energy. When the glucos e is taken up by the cells for energy or reborn into storage form, your blood sugar returns to a normal level called homeostasis.Now that we have a general idea of how our body regulates sugar intake we mickle discuss exactly what diabetes is. It is a disease in which your body is unable to use glucose for energy, resulting in elevated blood glucose levels. There are a some different types of diabetes. In some cases, a persons body does not make insulin at all. Thus, there is no insulin to tell your cells to use the glucose for energy. This is called type 1 diabetes, or it was previously known as juvenile diabetes. Only 5 to 10% of diabetes cases are diagnosed as type 1 (Grosvenor & Smolin, 93). It is usually spy before a pers... ...t is usually treatable, diabetes is a serious, scary disease. If it is not taken care of it can cause other serious complications such as bone marrow disease, blindness, and kidney failure. Although the exact cause is unknown, you should realize that there are many things you can do to prevent yourself from developing diabetes. Diet and exercise is the key. Now it is time that you draw up your knowledge to use. Keep yourself healthy and at a lower risk of developing one of Americas leading causes of death. Works CitedAmerican Diabetes acquaintance. 14 Feb 2004 diabetes.jspGrosvenor, Mary B. and Lori A. Smolin. Nutrition Science & Applications. 4th Edition. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2003. National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse. 15 Feb 2004