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Testing and exercise stressed to prevent prediabetes

[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Exercising and eating healthy in the new year may not just be good ways to trim your waistline, they may also help fend off prediabetes.

 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one in three American adults (86 million) has prediabetes, a precursor to type 2 diabetes. And 90 percent of those people don’t know they have prediabetes.

“And it’s important for us to know if we’re prediabetic or diabetic because it’s kind of a silent disease,” said Dr. Glenda Albizu, a practitioner at Dover Family Physicians.

 

There are no symptoms for prediabetes, which is why Albizu says it's important to get your blood sugar tested once a year.

 

Albizu said you can prevent prediabetes from becoming full-blown diabetes if you catch it early and then adjust your lifestyle accordingly.

 

"That means eating a well-balanced diet low in carbohydrates and exercising about 2 ½ hours a week," she said.

 

If you manage your blood sugar through exercise and healthy eating you can avoid medical complications or the need for drugs.  

 

15 to 30 percent of people with prediabetes will develop type 2 diabetes within five years, according to the CDC. And that can lead to all sorts of health complications like blindness, stroke or kidney failure.

 

Delaware currently has the 20th highest rate of diabetes in the nation.