
If you’ve gotten your blood sugar tested at a health fair or pharmacy, follow up at a clinic or doctor’s office to make sure the results are accurate. Testing for Type 2 DiabetesĪ simple blood test will let you know if you have diabetes.

Because symptoms can be hard to spot, it’s important to know the risk factors and to see your doctor to get your blood sugar tested if you have any of them. Type 2 diabetes symptoms often develop over several years and can go on for a long time without being noticed (sometimes there aren’t any noticeable symptoms at all). High blood sugar is damaging to the body and can cause other serious health problems, such as heart disease, vision loss, and kidney disease. Eventually your pancreas can’t keep up, and your blood sugar rises, setting the stage for prediabetes and type 2 diabetes. Your pancreas makes more insulin to try to get cells to respond. If you have type 2 diabetes, cells don’t respond normally to insulin this is called insulin resistance. Insulin is a hormone made by your pancreas that acts like a key to let blood sugar into the cells in your body for use as energy. Type 2 diabetes most often develops in people over age 45, but more and more children, teens, and young adults are also developing it. More than 37 million Americans have diabetes (about 1 in 10), and approximately 90-95% of them have type 2 diabetes.

Healthy eating is your recipe for managing diabetes.
