Make Changes While Your Young To Avoid Type 2 Diabetes: The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute funded a 20-year study on the affects of aerobic fitness on diabetes potential. The findings indicate ‘fitness for life’ is a worthy mantra.
ScienceDaily.com recently reported, “Most healthy 25 year olds don’t stay up at night worrying whether they are going to develop diabetes in middle age. The disease is not on their radar, and middle age is a lifetime away.”
The July release of the full details of the study (Diabetes Care) strongly indicates that a view toward a healthy lifestyle in your teens and twenties may be essential in creating a body environment that resists diabetes later in life.
One of the primary reasons this is believed to be true is that we all tend to slow down as we age. If you begin with an already sedentary lifestyle is becomes almost impossible to encourage yourself to work out more as you age. The natural tendency is to actually do less. This in turn accelerates the conditions needed for the development of diabetes.
Mercedes Carnethon, lead author and assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern’s Feinberg School was quoted in the report as saying, “These young adults are setting the stage for chronic disease in middle age by not being physically active and fit. People who have low fitness in their late teens and 20’s tend to stay the same later in life or even get worse. Not many climb out of that category.”
The report indicates this is the first long-term study of its kind because most previous studies, observed for much shorter periods of time, relied on self-reporting by participants. In this long-term case results were taken by subjecting participants to a treadmill test and allowing researchers to report actual results over nearly two decades.
The greatest predictor of diabetes in the study seems to be Body Mass Index (BMI). This is the total amount of body fat an individual has. The more body fat – the greater the potential for Type 2 diabetes.
Carnethon confirms, “The overwhelming importance of a high BMI to the development of diabetes was somewhat unexpected and leads us to think that activity levels need to be adequate not only to raise aerobic fitness, but also to maintain a healthy body weight. If two people have a similar level of fitness, the person with the higher BMI is more likely to develop diabetes.”
This report suggests that diabetes prevention may need to begin when young adults still believe they are invincible. Developing and maintaining a healthy weight and exercise program may be critical to the success of diabetes avoidance. The ScienceDaily.com report suggests, “Young adults (18 to 30 years old) with low aerobic fitness levels –as measured by a treadmill test — are two to three times more likely to develop diabetes in 20 years than those who are fit.”
A further breakdown of the report suggests, “Young women and young African Americans are less aerobically fit than men and white adults in the same age group, placing a larger number of these population subgroups at risk for diabetes.”
This study started in 1984 and was finished in 2001. More than 3,000 individuals participated and several issues were scrutinized prior to the development of publicly released findings.
The bare bones of the study suggest an early acceptance and enjoyment of physical activity may be necessary to combat the chronic disease of diabetes later in life.