Diabetes And Exercise: How To Organize Your Workouts For Better Results

Diabetes and Exercise: How to Organize Your Workouts for Better Results

If you have diabetes, you probably already know that you need to take precautions during exercise to help protect your feet and maintain stable blood sugar levels. But did you know that the type of workout you pick — along with how you organize that workout — could actually affect your blood sugar levels as well?
The Benefits of Physical Fitness for Type 2 Diabetes
“Exercise is a key diabetes self-management strategy, primarily because it can help reduce insulin resistance and lowers blood sugar levels,” says Lynn Grieger, RDN, CDE, a health, food, and fitness coach in Prescott, Arizona, and a medical reviewer for Everyday Health.
And the way that exercise affects your blood sugar depends on whether that exercise is aerobic or anaerobic, says Christine Mueller, RD, a nutrition specialist at the Adult Diabetes Education Program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Aerobic exercise uses large muscle groups in a repeated fashion for a sustained period of time, according to the Cleveland Clinic, while anaerobic exercise is intense physical activity of short duration. Examples of aerobic exercise include walking or jogging, and weight lifting falls under anaerobic exercise, Mueller explains.
“The reason is that we store glucose — what we use for energy — in our muscles and in our liver,” Mueller says. “And when we start doing a more intense exercise, like anaerobic exercise, the body says that it needs the energy right now, and dumps all the stored glucose in the blood.” That temporarily leads to a higher blood sugar. Meanwhile, low-intensity aerobic a Continue reading

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Type 2 Diabetes

Epidemologist Nick Wareham on the discovery of insulin, clinical diagnostic tests for diabetes, and the thrifty metabolism hypothesis
The video is a part of the project British Scientists produced in collaboration between Serious Science and the British Council.
The diabetes is a cluster of metabolic conditions all characterized by hypoglycemia, or raised blood glucose levels. This occurs in the face of absolute or relative insulin deficiency. Insulin is the key hormone secreted by the pancreas that modifies the glucose levels in the blood. And glucose has to be kept within a very tight range: too high – and we get complications related to the metabolic effects of glucose particularly in the small vessels of the body (the eyes, the feet) and also the large vessels like the heart itself. Too low – and we get problems of low glucose related to problems in the brain. So it’s kept in a very tight homeostatic range. When this gets out of control to the high level that is what the problem of diabetes is.
Now, until the early part of the 20th century, all diabetes was considered to be the same. In fact, it comes from a Greek word meaning – diabetes means the siphon. That term is used because it characterized by excess of urine and too much water flowing out of the body as a consequence of the high glucose levels. And the other word is ‘mellitus’ meaning sweet. So, originally the diagnosis was made by characterizing the urine as tasting sweet, because glucose was lost in the urine. And in the early part of the 20th century, our understanding of diabetes changed, when in Continue reading

Diabetes-Friendly Chocolate Desserts

Love chocolate? With these chocolate diabetic recipes, you can have your cake and eat it, too. And your brownies and cookies and ice cream!
Love chocolate? With these chocolate diabetic recipes, you can have your cake and eat it, too. And your brownies and cookies and ice cream!
Love chocolate? With these chocolate diabetic recipes, you can have your cake and eat it, too. And your brownies and cookies and ice cream!
Love chocolate? With these chocolate diabetic recipes, you can have your cake and eat it, too. And your brownies and cookies and ice cream! Continue reading

Broccoli sprout extract may help to treat type 2 diabetes

An effective new treatment for type 2 diabetes could be sitting in your fridge, according to the results of a new study.
Researchers found that a compound found in broccoli sprouts and other cruciferous vegetables led to a significant improvement in fasting blood glucose levels among obese adults with type 2 diabetes.
Furthermore, the compound, which is called sulforaphane, was found to reduce the amount of glucose produced by cultured liver cells, and it also appeared to reverse abnormal gene expression in the livers of rats.
The study - conducted by Annika Axelsson, of the Lund University Diabetes Center in Sweden, and colleagues - was recently published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of diabetes, accounting for around 90 to 95 percent of all diagnosed cases.
The condition arises when the body is unable to use the hormone insulin effectively, causing blood glucose levels to become too high. Unless blood glucose levels are controlled, type 2 diabetes can cause a number of severe complications, including heart attack, stroke, nerve damage, and kidney failure.
While there are medications, such as metformin, that can help people with type 2 diabetes to manage their blood glucose levels, Axelsson and team note that some patients are unable to use them due to their severe side effects, which include kidney damage.
As such, there is a need for safer alternatives. Could sulforaphane meet this need?
Sulforaphane improved liver gene expression, blood glucose levels
To answer this question, Axelsson and colleagues created a gen Continue reading

7 Things You Need To Know About Exercising with Diabetes

If there’s one thing people with diabetes know, it’s that regular exercise requires more than just discipline and hard work. Mismanaging your blood sugar, diet and exercise intensity levels can have adverse and unpredictable effects on your body.
This month, we spoke with Dr. Jonathon R. Fowles, an exercise physiologist at the Centre of Lifestyle Studies at Acadia University, to help answer some common questions about exercising with diabetes:
1) How often should I exercise?
“Regardless of whether you have type 1 or type 2 diabetes, the CDA recommends 150 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous exercise,” Fowles says.
“You should be combining both aerobic (running, swimming etc.) and anaerobic (resistance training, weight lifting) activity.”
2) What are the benefits?
“People with type 2 diabetes can expect to lower their AIC levels after a couple months of meeting the guidelines, and drastically reduce the progression of their diabetes, as well as their cardiovascular risk,” Fowles says.
For people with type 1 diabetes, Fowles says the benefits are a little different.
“The combination of exercise with insulin can be quite dramatic. People with type 1 diabetes should communicate openly with their diabetes educator or physician, to learn the interaction between exercise, food and insulin," he says.
“The evidence isn’t quite as strong for glucose regulation for people with type 1 diabetes, but it’s definitely beneficial for their cardiovascular risk reduction, overall health and quality of life.”
3) Why is anaerobic exercise important?
While the treadm Continue reading