ChipMonk TV: What is Diabetes?

In this video, I talk about my experience with type two diabetes and explain what diabetes is, how it affects us, and how to potentially manage it.

See the full story about my experience with diabetes in The Story of ChipMonk and in our about us page at https://chipmonkbaking.com/pages/our-...

Live well, eat better, and indulge mindfully.

Transcript:

"Hey guys. This is Jose with ChipMonk Baking. Today we're going to be talking about something very dear and near to our hearts: diabetes.

• What is it?

• What kinds of diabetes are there?

• How do you get it?

• How can you manage it?

• And what can you eat on it.

Diabetes is really important to us because I have type II diabetes. There are two main types of diabetes in the world. Type I, when your body can't produce insulin naturally so you have to take injections, and that's actually the rarer form of diabetes. More common form is type II. Type II diabetes is mainly identified by the body's inability to deal with insulin.

So what ends up happening over time is as your blood sugar gets higher and higher and higher, much like what would happen when you have too much, say alcohol or a drug, you end up developing a tolerance over time.

When you have a lot of blood sugar circulating around the clock your body desensitizes itself to insulin, so what ends up happening is we require more and more insulin to achieve the same effects that you would normally get. The problem is the body just can't produce enough insulin at some point, and you know, that's kind of diabetes in a nutshell. Too much blood sugar and not enough insulin to put it into your cells. 

The World Health Organization Estimated that about 422 million people are effected by diabetes. In the United States alone 1 in 4 people are pre-diabetic, and 1 in 3 people are either diabetic or pre-diabetic, so this is an issue effecting a lot of people. 

So now that we know what diabetes is, what can we do about it? Well like I said, there's too much blood sugar in your stream, and that's effectively what's causing the issue. The simple solution would be to reduce the amount of blood sugar. So how do you do that? Well, there's certain food groups that elevate your blood sugar: Carbohydrates, especially refined and processed carbohydrates like breads, pastas, rice, I know I'm talking about all the flavorful things, but unfortunately those are the things that effect the body the worst.

So if you reduce those items in your diet, over time you should lower the amount of blood sugar. What you can have instead is more protein, more healthy sources of fat. The lifestyle that choice that I've made personally is the low carb, high fat diet. Doesn't mean I'm doing keto. I'm just doing a subset of keto. I have a lot of vegetables. I have berries. What I don't have is bread, dessert, or refined sugar.

Anything processed is probably gonna effect me too much, it's why I tend to stay away from that. The good news is I've managed to control my diabetes strictly through food and exercise, and it's because my body is now more sensitive to insulin.

Diabetes is really important to ChipMonk because it's my personal story, and it's what lead to the creation of ChipMonk. Dessert is probably the hardest thing to give up when you have to switch to a different lifestyle choice and become more mindful of the ingredients that you are putting into your body, so we made it a point to start with the hardest things to substitute out, which in my case was the cakes and cookies and brownies, and through that we've managed to create something that not only helps me, but it helps everyone else as well."