Diabetes

Diabetes is a chronic (long-lasting) health condition that affects how your body turns food into energy.

Your body breaks down most of the food you eat into sugar (glucose) and releases it into your bloodstream. When your blood sugar goes up, it signals your pancreas to release insulin. Insulin acts like a key to let the blood sugar into your body’s cells for use as energy.

With diabetes, your body doesn’t make enough insulin or can’t use it as well as it should. When there isn’t enough insulin or cells stop responding to insulin, too much blood sugar stays in your bloodstream. Over time, that can cause serious health problems, such as heart disease, vision loss, and kidney disease.

There isn’t a cure yet for diabetes, but losing weight, eating healthy food, and being active can really help. Other things you can do to help:

Type 1 Diabetes

Type 1 diabetes is thought to be caused by an autoimmune reaction (the body attacks itself by mistake). This reaction stops your body from making insulin. Approximately 5-10% of the people who have diabetes have type 1. Symptoms of type 1 diabetes often develop quickly. It’s usually diagnosed in children, teens, and young adults. If you have type 1 diabetes, you’ll need to take insulin every day to survive. Currently, no one knows how to prevent type 1 diabetes.

Type 2 Diabetes

With type 2 diabetes, your body doesn’t use insulin well and can’t keep blood sugar at normal levels. About 90-95% of people with diabetes have type 2. It develops over many years and is usually diagnosed in adults (but more and more in children, teens, and young adults). You may not notice any symptoms, so it’s important to get your blood sugar tested if you’re at risk. Type 2 diabetes can be prevented or delayed with healthy lifestyle changes, such as:

Losing weight.
Eating healthy food.
Being active.

Gestational Diabetes

Gestational diabetes develops in pregnant women who have never had diabetes. If you have gestational diabetes, your baby could be at higher risk for health problems. Gestational diabetes usually goes away after your baby is born. However, it increases your risk for type 2 diabetes later in life. Your baby is more likely to have obesity as a child or teen and develop type 2 diabetes later in life.

Pre-diabetes

In the United States, 96 million adults—more than 1 in 3—have pre*diabetes- More than 8 in 10 of them don’t know they have it. With pre-diabetes, blood sugar levels are higher than normal, but not high enough for a type 2 diabetes diagnosis. Pre-diabetes raises your risk for type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. But there’s good news. If you have pre-diabetes, lifestyle change can help you take healthy steps to reverse it.

Keeping your blood sugar levels within the range recommended by your doctor can be challenging. That's because many things make your blood sugar levels change, sometimes unexpectedly. Following are some factors that can affect your blood sugar levels.

Food

Healthy eating is a cornerstone of healthy living — with or without diabetes. But if you have diabetes, you need to know how foods affect your blood sugar levels. It's not only the type of food you eat, but also how much you eat and the combinations of food types you eat.

Exercise

Physical activity is another important part of your diabetes management plan. When you exercise, your muscles use sugar (glucose) for energy. Regular physical activity also helps your body use insulin more efficiently.

These factors work together to lower your blood sugar level. The more strenuous your workout, the longer the effect lasts. But even light activities — such as housework, gardening or being on your feet for extended periods — can improve your blood sugar.

Medication

Insulin and other diabetes medications are designed to lower your blood sugar levels when diet and exercise alone aren't sufficient for managing diabetes. But the effectiveness of these medications depends on the timing and size of the dose. Medications you take for conditions other than diabetes also can affect your blood sugar levels.

Alcohol

The liver normally releases stored sugar to counteract falling blood sugar levels. But if your liver is busy metabolizing alcohol, your blood sugar level may not get the boost it needs from your liver. Alcohol can result in low blood sugar shortly after you drink it and for as long as 24 hours afterward.

Menstruation and menopause

Changes in hormone levels the week before and during menstruation can result in significant fluctuations in blood sugar levels.

If you're likely approaching menopause or experiencing menopause, talk to your doctor about whether you need to monitor your blood sugar level more often. Symptoms of menopause can sometimes be confused with symptoms of low blood sugar, so whenever possible, check your blood sugar before treating a suspected low to confirm the low blood sugar level.Most forms of birth control can be used by women with diabetes without a problem. However, oral contraceptives may raise blood sugar levels in some women.

Stress

If you're stressed, the hormones your body produces in response to prolonged stress may cause a rise in your blood sugar level. Additionally, it may be harder to closely follow your usual diabetes management routine if you're under a lot of extra pressure.

Take control. Once you know how stress affects your blood sugar level, fight back. Learn relaxation techniques, prioritize your tasks and set limits. Whenever possible, avoid common stressors. Exercise can often help relieve stress and lower your blood sugar level.

The good news, is that Type 2 diabetes is reversible. Through diet changes and weight loss, you may be able to reach and hold normal blood sugar levels without medication. This doesn’t mean you’re completely cured. Type 2 diabetes is an ongoing disease.

As a result, some people are looking for natural ways to effectively manage their blood sugar levels, with herbal and complementary becoming popular. While you shouldn’t use supplements to replace your diabetes medication, research on some of them does suggest that they can help with type 2 diabetes management

Safety and effectiveness of using diabetes supplements

Good supplements can help to promote healthy blood sugar levels, postprandial blood glucose, and HbA1c. They can also help to lower total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and triglycerides. They can even increase high-density lipoprotein levels, which is not an easy feat. Some dietary supplements can also help with insulin resistance .

The most commonly used medication for diabetes mellitus is metformin. Metformin is used in several diabetes mellitus types, including gestational diabetes. There are a couple of diabetes supplements that can interact with metformin. One of these is cinnamon bark.

Cinnamon increases the effects of metformin through added drug effects.

A fairly significant interaction is possible, so you will want to be sure your doctor closely monitors you if you are taking both metformin and cinnamon bark.

Keep an eye on your blood sugar levels since you are at increased risk of hypoglycaemia while on both of these at once.

Chromium is a helpful supplement in diabetes treatment, but there is a risk of a minor interaction with metformin. This happens due to added drug effects, which lead to increased effects of specifically.

Although there are some supplement-medication interactions to look out for, several supplements are safe to take with metformin (alpha-lipoic acid, for example).

Just be sure to check with your health care provider to see what is and is not safe for you to take.

The best supplements for managing diabetes have a broad spectrum of minerals and nutrients. You want to make sure there is a clinically significant dose of the key ingredients.

You also want to put high-quality, natural ingredients into your body. After all, that is likely one reason you turned to a supplement, rather than a pharmaceutical drug, in the first place.

But guess what? Even in its ideal dose, an ingredient is useless if it isn’t in the correct form! You want a highly bioavailable form of each supplement ingredient. This way, your body will absorb what you are putting into it.

Not only are you getting more benefits from a highly bioavailable product, but you are getting more bang for your buck. You will need less of the product to have more of a therapeutic effect.

When looking for diabetes management supplements, make sure you get a product that contains scientifically proven ingredients that have clear benefits specifically for diabetes.

Transparency

Transparency is important. You want to know what you are getting when you spend your hard-earned money on a diabetes management supplement.

This is why you want to get your product from a company that provides transparent information about their laboratory testing.

You also want a supplement from a company that complies with government groups, such as the Food and Drug Administration (the FDA).

You want to see that they clearly list their ingredients. As much as you want transparency in laboratory testing, it is equally important to have transparency in labeling.