Diabetes – What you need to know
What is Diabetes?
Diabetes is Australia’s fastest growing chronic disease. It can affect your whole body, if undetected or poorly controlled, diabetes can lead to blindness, kidney failure, lower limb amputation, heart attack, 
stroke, impotence and potentially cancer as high blood sugar stimulates tumour growth.
When you eat a high starch/high carbohydrate food (sugar, sweets, sugary drinks, juice, cereal, bread including wholemeal and wholegrain, pasta, rice, milk, yoghurt, fruit, starchy vegetables like potatoes, legumes etc), and as you digest the carbohydrate, it becomes glucose (sugar) in the blood. A 200g serving of pasta will release 150g of glucose into the bloodstream.
It is essential that you don’t have too much glucose in your blood for any length of time because glucose acts like sandpaper, damaging your blood vessels, arteries and nerves. When your body detects glucose in the blood, your pancreas produces insulin to take the glucose from the blood and use it for energy in our cells, it is stored in your liver and muscles as ready energy but if your stores are full, it converts into fat.
Yes, that is right; high starch/high carbohydrate foods (eg grains/sweets) are broken down in the body into long chain triglycerides (driving weight gain and heart disease).
