Can Diabetes Be Prevented?

Diabetes is a condition that occurs when your body doesn't produce enough of the hormone insulin or when your body develops insulin resistance and stops being able to use insulin properly. Insulin helps regulate your blood sugar, so if you have diabetes, you need to take care every day to monitor and manage your blood sugar levels.

At Living Water Community Health and Wellness Clinic, also known as Living Water Clinic, our team of urgent care and family practice doctors provide support to patients with concerns about diabetes from locations in Porterville, Lindsay, and Visalia, California.

Some types of diabetes can be prevented with early intervention. Here’s what you need to know about diabetes prevention.

Type 1 vs. Type 2 diabetes

Most people with Type 1 diabetes develop the condition in childhood or adolescence. Type 1 diabetes occurs when your immune system damages your pancreas, affecting your ability to produce insulin. Type 1 diabetes isn’t preventable, and it requires long-term management and, typically, insulin supplementation to regulate your blood sugar.

If you have Type 2 diabetes, your body develops insulin resistance over time. Type 2 diabetes more usually develops during your teen or adult years, but it can appear in children, as well. Some women develop Type 2 diabetes during pregnancy, a condition known as gestational diabetes.

Insulin resistance and prediabetes

Type 2 diabetes proceeds through several stages before it becomes full-blown and chronic.

As your body develops insulin resistance, it produces more insulin without having the needed regulating effect on your blood sugar levels. Testing for insulin resistance can let you know that your body is starting to struggle to properly use insulin, giving you a head start on prevention.

You could also have prediabetes, a condition in which your blood sugar is higher than normal but hasn’t yet reached the levels that qualify you as having full-blown Type 2 diabetes.

Both insulin resistance and prediabetes respond to treatment, potentially preventing you from developing full diabetes.

Diabetes prevention

If you have prediabetes or insulin resistance, it’s time to get serious about diabetes prevention. You can talk to a primary care doctor at Living Water Clinic about the right prevention plan to help you avoid full-blown diabetes. You may need to:

• Use medications like metformin to keep your blood sugar levels low
• Change your dietary habits — adding more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, legumes, and lean proteins and avoiding processed foods and sugars
• Prioritize getting regular exercise, with a goal of a minimum of 30 minutes of moderate activity five days of the week
• Focus on weight loss, especially reducing belly fat

With the right approach, you can reduce your insulin resistance and restore your body’s natural ability to regulate blood sugar.

To learn more about diabetes prevention, get in touch with the team of family medicine doctors at Living Water Clinic today. You can call us to schedule an appointment or use our online booking system. Walk-ins are also welcome!