6 Signs of Type 2 Diabetes
Lately it seems like everyone and their overweight uncle is developing type 2 diabetes.
With the average North American lifestyle being increasingly built around stress and convenience, it’s no great mystery as to why type 2 diabetes is now the most commonly diagnosed form of diabetes. Often referred to as adult-onset, type 2 diabetes is usually a result of lifestyle choices that need to become lifestyle changes.
Everyone is occasionally guilty of skimping on exercise and following a junk food laden diet, but if you’re worried that your unhealthy habits may have caught up with you, read on for the top six warning signs of type 2 diabetes.
Increased Thirst
An infrequent case of the cottonmouth is nothing to be concerned 
about, but when an occasional thirst becomes an unquenchable one, it may be indicative of a problem. This is simply related to the dehydration caused by frequent urination.
Frequent Urination
Basic biology: when you drink more, you pee more. While it may be possible for a person unknowingly stricken with type 2 diabetes to not realize how much water they’ve been guzzling, it’s going to be hard to ignore the constant back-and-forth bathroom shuffle.
Here’s the medical explanation. The kidney acts as a huge filter for the blood. There are about 7 million functional filters (called nephrons) in each kidney. These are so small that no cells can get through and very little protein (so little that you could almost say no protein). However, glucose can freely filter out of the blood into the filtrate (soon to be pee). Glucose levels in the blood and filtrate will be identical.
Now here’s where it gets a bit complicated. After the filter, there is a tube wrapped in blood vessels. This tube selectively reabsorbed or secretes ‘things’ from and into the filtrate. At normal blood glucose levels, 100% of the filtered glucose is reabsorbed via carrier systems in the tube closest to the filter.
These carrier systems have a maximum work rate. So, at high levels of blood glucose, filtrate glucose concentration will also be high. If it is higher than the rate at which the carrier system can put glucose back into the blood, the extra glucose will remain in the filtrate. This is bad.
Glucose is what is known as an osmotically active molecule. Simply put, where it goes, water follows. So, if glucose is in the urine, more water than what the body wants will end up in the urine.
Your kidney filters about 180 L of blood per day. Normally you pee only about 1-2 L. With diabetes, you can urinate up to 20 L per day! That’s a lot of water loss considering you only have 5 L of blood circulating in the body. That’s why you get really thirsty.
Fatigue
In type 2 diabetes, no energy is getting to the cell so it has nothing to convert to energy. Imagine running a marathon after living on a bowl of cereal a day for months. You’ll get very tired. It’s the same with type 2 diabetes. Only a little bit of energy is getting into the cells which is usually not enough to meet the demands. So, even though there is a lot of energy in the blood in the form of glucose, the cells aren’t getting enough of it to keep up with demand and you will feel crushingly tired.
Frequent or Slow-Healing Infections
6 Signs of Type 2 Diabetes
There is still a lot of energy in the blood. Other organisms can actually feed off of the blood and glucose in the blood. So, if you cut yourself, the bacteria within the wound will have a ton of energy from which to work and multiply. That slows healing.
Those are the big four that will help you catch type 2 diabetes while it’s in the early stages and allow you to start treating it through lifestyle controls or medications. Any or all of these symptoms should be enough to send you to your family doctor for a urine test, but in case it isn’t, two common symptoms of later stage type 2 diabetes are retinophathy or blurred vision and peripheral neuropathy or numbness in the limbs, primarily the feet.
“If you think there is a chance you could have diabetes, it is imperative you get to your doctor to get checked,” says Dr. Richard Tytus, Canada’s leading obesity expert. “There are so many ways to get it under control, but it can’t be treated if you don’t know it’s there.”
