Lowering type 2 diabetes risk is more than just losing weight

Warding off type 2 diabetes isn’t so much about just losing weight—it’s about normalizing your blood sugar levels.

People think that by losing weight, they have reduced their chances of developing diabetes—but your risk falls by more than 70 percent just by focusing on blood sugar, or glucose, even if you don’t lose a single pound.

Most pre-diabetic strategies focus on weight loss and adopting a healthy diet, but this can be a superficial strategy if you’re not understanding the biological factors that drive diabetes, say researchers from University Hospital of Tübingen in Germany.

They tracked the health of 1,100 people who were pre-diabetic—the phase when insulin isn’t efficiently breaking down glucose from carbohydrates—and 234 of them didn’t lose any weight, and some even gained some weight, during the year-long study.  Despite this, 22 percent normalized their blood sugar levels, and they reduced their risk of developing diabetes by as much as 71 percent.

Those who did lose weight lowered their risk by a similar amount—but, say the researchers, the approach is less valuable if people don’t understand what’s going on in their body.  Those who concentrated on understanding the way glucose is processed by the body were still free of diabetes nine years later.

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