Type 2 diabetes, also known as noninsulin-dependent diabetes, is a condition that affects an alarmingly high percentage of the population. The most typical cause is when your body’s cells become resistant to insulin, whose job is to facilitate the transportation of sugar into the cells. Sadly, there still is no cure for type 2 diabetes. In order to avoid the very serious complications that come with this disease, drastic live changes must often be made.

While there are scientists all over the world that are searching for a silver bullet to get rid of this disease once and for all, curing type 2 diabetes will be a difficult task. This is because it is most often caused by a lifetime of poor eating and exercising habits. You see, insulin is a hormone that is released when glucose is introduced into the blood stream. Its job is to take that glucose and transport it into the cells, so they can use it for energy. Eating poor foods in excess (such as sweets, bad carbohydrates, and trans fats) and not exercising can cause your cells do develop a problem called insulin resistance. This means that the cells are less receptive to the insulin, which means more glucose is left in the bloodstream (know as high blood sugar) as well as causing the cells to be energy depleted.

It should be noted that not everyone who has this disease got it because they at poorly and did not exercise enough. Some people are just predisposed to it based on genetics.

As you can see, this puts the researchers in a very tough predicament. While they may be able to create drugs that manage to symptoms of this disease, they cannot do anything to get people to live a healthy life. These drugs are just crutches we use to stand on after our bad habits finally start to catch up to us. If a doctor were to find a super drug that fully cured type 2 diabetes, many people would see it as a sign that they could eat all the junk food they wanted and just sit on the couch all day. However, diabetes is not the only side effect of living a life such as this.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes and epidemic as “a disease affecting or tending to affect a disproportionately large number of individuals within a population, community, or region at the same time”, and diabetes fits this definition perfectly. As a society, the only way to really cure type 2 diabetes is by making drastic changes in how we treat our bodies. For many people diabetes is a completely preventable disease. Even people who have already been diagnosed with it, or the precursor known as pre-diabetes, will see significant improvement when they start eating a better diet and getting out there and exercising each day.

Nearly 25% of the entire US population have either type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes. That is a staggering number that I hope would shock most people. If big changes are not made soon this number will only continue to grow higher each year.