i entered medical college in the year 1994,and first saw outpatients in the madras GH in 95. there used to be a forgotten and almost defunct dept.called the dept of diabetology ,meant for treating patients with high blood sugar,which hardly used to receive any patients all day long ,those days. 5 years later when i was doing my internship in the same dept., i had to struggle past a horde of diabetes patients waiting for treatment, to get to the other side of the hall. diabetes ,known as rich mans disease hitherto, has come to visit the poorest of the poor . what has changed about us that has made the scenario so scary ? as a practicing diabetician i had ,over a period of time observed certain lifestyle changes that almost serves as an open invitation for the disease to enter our body.people ask me whether diabetes is caused by eating too many sweet things and whether we can prevent the disease by eating less sweets. the answer is NO.you can eat as much sweets as you please till you are diagnosed.but the moment you are diagnosed, forget that sweets exist,forever. every thing that you eat contains sugar,not just sweets , and sugar is energy for every cell that works in you.you cant live without sugar in your diet . amount of food we eat today would pale in comparison with what people ate 50 years back. if too much eating caused diabetes then our forefathers should have suffered hell of a lot more than us,which is not the case. the difference is that they utilised the sugar that was taken in by them by working 10 times harder. their cells constantly used up all the sugar they ate because they burnt the sugar during the course of their work -both mental and physical work .and believe me thinking productively with a calm mind, alone consumes lot of sugar and reduces blood sugar levels. imagine the lives we lived as children. we had the need to either walk or bicycle our way to school each day, and to tuitions later. not many schools had a pick up or drop facility then . our children today would either get picked up at the doorstep or would use 2 wheelers to reach schools. so the metabolic systems of young children are not conditioned to burn sugar the way they should be. and where was junk food then .the only time we ate apart from staple diet was during festivities. we used to walk some distance or cycle down to meet friends, because we had no phones . sitting in front of a tv for very long was not an interesting proposition in the days of DD. now you see kids chat on phone or sit like a couch potato in front of TV without moving any muscle for hours on end,not allowing the sugar in the body to be utilized by their cells. this is were the seeds of diabetes are sown.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 21:45:00 +0000
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