Beating Diabetes

Introduction

Like many diseases, diabetes is caused by our genes and our personal environment, which is created by our lifesyle. We cannot yett modify our genes, bu we can modify our lifesyle. Here at Harvard and in medical centers around the world, we and many colleagues have conduced studies involving housands of people who were a risk for developing diabetes or who had diabetes. Tha research proved ha changes in lifesyle-changes ha anyone can make-have enormous power both to prevent and to help treat diabetes.

That is why we wrote this book. We want to share the information from scientific studies with you so that you can make the best choices for your health, whether you have already been diagnosed with diabetes, have been told that you are at risk for it, or simply want to be as healthy as you can be. You are probably bombarded on a daily basis with advertisements, infbmercials, and other advice regarding your health. Our message is based on the most up-to-date scientific data available.

Enormous changes in lifestyles have occurred in the past century. For much of the world's population, subsistence lifestyles, characterized by farming, hunting, and other occupations in which substantial energy had to be expended to obtain food-or the currency to obtain food-have given way to lifestyles in which little physical effort is needed to obtain nutrition. Farming, hunting, and fishing have been replaced by efficient mass production of food with near unlimited quantities available in most places in the world for little effort or expenditure of energy.

As machines and automation have improved, physical labor in factories and trades has been progressively replaced by white-collar jobs. Travel has been made increasingly effortless, threatening to make our feet vestigial organs, except for the need to operate the gas pedals of our cars.

Obviously, the industrial revolution and the technological-computer revolution that followed it have had spectacular benefits for much of the world. However, the changes in lifestyle accompanying these revolutions have a dark side that has spawned epidemics of obesity and diabetes. The consequences of these conditions, including the increasing occurrence of hypertension, abnormal lipid metabolism, and cardiovascular disease, have become the major health problems for much of the world's population in the twenty-first century. These chronic, degenerative diseases have replaced, to a great extent, the infectious diseases of the past two thousand years-such as tuberculosis, cholera, malaria, and the plague-as [he major causes of illness and death in North Ameiica and Europe and, increasingly, in Asia, Africa, and South America. The pandemic of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, based on changes in lifestyle, poses the greatest threat to out survival for the foreseeable future.

The major goals of this book are to provide you with a practical understanding of how today's typical lifestyle has led to these problems and to give you strategies that have been proved in clinical studies to improve health for people with diabetes or at risk for it. We will focus on practical changes you can make in how you shop for food, how you plan your meals and snacks, how you cook your food, and even how you look at eating, as well as changes in physical activity that have been shown to decrease weight and make a real difference in diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. In addition, we will discuss the complex interactions between lifestyle and diabetes, and the adjustments of lifestyle and medical treatment that should be made if you or someone you care about has type 1 or type 2 diabetes.

We hare both spent our careers developing, studying, and teaching the lifestyle changes that are discussed here. We believe fervently that the program we offer works and can be one of the best things you can do to preserve and even improve your health. All of our recommendations are based on scientific evidence and practical experience and are the choices that ate most likely to improve your prospects for long-term health.

The battle against the damaging effects of our current lifestyle is often framed as a cultural war against the manufacturers and sellers of processed foods, drive-through nutrition, all-you-can-eat buffets, supeisized meals, and processed meals that are high in fat and calories. Similarly, television and computer games are often blamed for our lack of exercise.

There is a measure of truth to this. Marketing can be quite powerful. However, in the end, we are responsible for the lifestyle choices we make. In this book, we will provide you with proven strategies that you can use to prevent and help treat diabetes-specific approaches to shopping, cooking, eating, and activity and exercise. The strategies do not require superhuman willpower, an unreasonable amount of rime, or more money. They require only that you make a conscious commitment to your health and to the health of your family.

Source: David M. Nathan, M.D. and Linda M. Delahanty, M.S., R.D, Beating diabetes: The First Complete Program Clinically Proven to Dramatically Improve Your Glucose Tolerance, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. (2005)