Gold’s Gym Douglasville Enewsletter

By Gordon Johnson 

Manage Diabetes with Exercise 

People with type 2 diabetes may go a long way in managing their condition if they take up regular exercise, a new research review shows.  Researchers found that when they combined the results from 103 studies, there was clear evidence that lifestyle changes helped people with type 2 diabetes gain better control over their blood sugar. But while diet, exercise and medication are all vital to diabetes management, exercise alone was effective in these studies.

Exercise the Key to Controlling Diabetes 

In fact, the review found, studies that focused only on boosting exercise levels yielded greater benefits than those that tried to change patients’ diets, exercise habits and medication adherence all at once.  The findings “could mean that it is easier for people to focus on one thing at a time,” lead stud y author Dr. Vicki Conn said in a statement. “It is easy for people to get overwhelmed when asked to make too many changes.”  Conn and her colleagues at the University of Missouri-Columbia report the findings in the journal Diabetologia.  For their study, the researchers combined the results of 103 studies that involved a total of 10,455 adults with type 2 diabetes, a disorder in which the body cannot properly use the blood-sugar-regulating hormone insulin.

If you suffer from Type 2 Diabetes or know someone who does, learn more about how exercise can help. 

People Marrying excess weight who aim to ward off diabetes should try to lose the pounds before they reach middle age, Australian researchers suggest.

BODY MASS INDEX Strong Predictor for Diabetes Risk

A woman’s body mass index (BMI) in her late 40s was the strongest predictor of her risk of developing diabetes over the next eight years, Dr. Gita D. Mishra of the University of Queensland and her colleagues found.

On the other hand, there was no link between weight change in subsequent years and the likelihood of becoming diabetic.

Is Your Weight The Problem?

While excess weight is understood to boost the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, the effects of shorter-term weight gain or loss are not as clear, Mishra and her team note in the journal Diabetes Care. To investigate, the researchers followed 7,239 women for 8 years. Study participants were 45 to 50 years old when the study began, and they completed surveys on their health at the study’s outset in 1996 and in 1998, 2001 and 2004.

Your greatest risk.

Those with BMIs of 25 or greater, indicating they were overweight or obese, in 1996 were at the highest risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 2004, the researchers found. Very obese women with BMIs of 35 or above were 12 times more likely than their normal-weight peers to become diabetic.

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