Health implications of Type I diabetes and physical activity. What is physical activity and why do we need it in our lives? In our seminar on Physical Activity and Disease,” we chose to focus on diabetes as our research topic. Due to the complexity of diabetes, we narrowed our focus to Type I diabetes, also known as insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM). This type of diabetes requires daily insulin injections to satisfy the body’s insulin needs, and those who have it cannot survive without these injections.
Overview of Diabetes Type I. What is diabetes type I? In order to understand the disease, we firstly need to know about insulin. Insulin is a hormone whose role is to convert the food we eat into various useful substances, discarding everything that is wasteful. It is the job of insulin to ensure that the useful substances are put to best use for our well-being. The useful substances are used for building cells, made ready for immediate expenditure as energy, and stored for later energy expenditure.
The cause of diabetes is a lack of the hormone insulin. As a result, the processes that involve converting the foods we eat into various useful substances do not occur. Insulin comes from the beta cells located in the pancreas. In the case of type I diabetes, almost all of the beta cells have been destroyed. Therefore, daily injections of insulin become essential to life. One of the products that is of vital importance in our bodies is glucose, a simple carbohydrate sugar needed by virtually every part of our body as fuel to function.
Insulin controls the amount of glucose distributed to vital organs and muscles. In diabetics, due to the lack of insulin and control of glucose given to different body parts, they face death if they don’t inject themselves with insulin daily. Strict monitoring of diabetes is necessary for disease control, leaving little room for carelessness. As a result, diabetic patients are susceptible to many other diseases and serious conditions if proper treatment is not followed.
Other diseases that a diabetic is susceptible to include cardiovascular disease, stroke, peripheral artery disease, gangrene, kidney disease, blindness, hypertension, nerve damage, and impotence. Essentially, diabetic individuals have an increased risk of infection, and special care must be taken to reduce the likelihood of developing these serious conditions.
What is physical activity? According to Bouchard (1988), physical activity refers to any bodily movement that is produced by skeletal muscles and results in energy expenditure.
Therefore, this includes sports and leisure activities of all forms. Why do we need physical activity in our lives? Physical activity and exercise help tune the human machine,” our bodies. Imagine a car constantly driven only to stop for fuel. It would be prone to all sorts of damage, such as rusting, oil leaking, dehydration, and the chances are most likely it would die in the middle of the road not long after.
This is what the body would be like if we didn’t exercise at all. We would be the perfect target for all kinds of diseases and infections due to today’s lifestyle. For those of us who are carriers of some disease or illness, we are still encouraged to exercise by our physicians if we have the strength to. This is to help make our organs, muscles, bones, and arteries more efficient and better equipped to fight against the disease or illness.
This is our way of counterattacking. If we are still healthy, we can reduce the chances of getting an illness or a disease. Physical activity and diabetes (epidemiology) have become increasingly important. Recently, insulin injections have become available to dependent patients. However, in the pre-insulin era, physical exercise was one of the few therapies available to physicians in combating diabetes.
For an IDDM carrier to benefit from exercise, they need to be well aware of their body and the consequences of exercising. If an IDDM carrier has no real control over their situation and just exercises without considering their diet, time of insulin intake, type of exercise, duration of the exercise, and intensity, then the results can be very hazardous to the patient.
