More than eighteen million Americans have diabetes. They shouldn’t. Although heredity plays a role in the disease, most patients with the common form of diabetes have themselves to blame, not their parents. Guilt is not the issue, but health is. Diabetes can lead to heart attacks, strokes, blindness, kidney failure, amputations, and early death.
You can find out if you have diabetes by taking a simple blood test, the fasting blood sugar. Values of 100 mg/dL or lower are normal, levels above 126 mg/dL indicate diabetes, and scores between 100 and 126 reflect increased risk. But even if your fasting blood sugar is normal, you should take steps to keep it that way—and exercise plays a crucial role. It promotes weight loss (see “Exercise and Obesity,” next), but it can even help folks who remain overweight. Working muscles burn up glucose. But the most important physiologic benefit of exercise is to increase tissue sensitivity to insulin so more sugar enters cells even though the pancreas puts out less insulin. And this important metabolic asset persists for up to twenty-four hours after a single exercise session.
Various studies show that regular exercise cuts the risk of diabetes by 16 to 50 percent. Moderate exercise, such as walking, will give you lots of protection, but this is one area in which more exercise is even better. In the University of Pennsylvania College Alumni Study, for example, the risk of diabetes was reduced by 6 percent with every five hundred calories burned up in exercise per week. Exercise fights diabetes. How sweet it is
You can find out if you have diabetes by taking a simple blood test, the fasting blood sugar. Values of 100 mg/dL or lower are normal, levels above 126 mg/dL indicate diabetes, and scores between 100 and 126 reflect increased risk. But even if your fasting blood sugar is normal, you should take steps to keep it that way—and exercise plays a crucial role. It promotes weight loss (see “Exercise and Obesity,” next), but it can even help folks who remain overweight. Working muscles burn up glucose. But the most important physiologic benefit of exercise is to increase tissue sensitivity to insulin so more sugar enters cells even though the pancreas puts out less insulin. And this important metabolic asset persists for up to twenty-four hours after a single exercise session.
Various studies show that regular exercise cuts the risk of diabetes by 16 to 50 percent. Moderate exercise, such as walking, will give you lots of protection, but this is one area in which more exercise is even better. In the University of Pennsylvania College Alumni Study, for example, the risk of diabetes was reduced by 6 percent with every five hundred calories burned up in exercise per week. Exercise fights diabetes. How sweet it is
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