In this radio interview, Dr. Aarush Manchanda, author of Your Heart House : An Artisan's Approach™ to Understanding Heart Health, discusses diabetes and how it can affect our heart health.

Dr. Manchanda recently read that the American waistline is getting bigger and bigger, and this is part of the reason why diabetes is becoming more prevalent. Being more active and losing fat, will help us to cure Type 2 diabetes.

Has Our Response to Diabetes Improved?

We do know a lot more about diabetes: it’s a common chronic disease that’s preventable, but once you’ve got it, it’s hard to cure. However, science is making great progress in the ways that it can be cured. But rather than looking at the future, Dr. Manchanda wants us to think of the present, and urges people to make sure they’re getting an early diagnosis. Yes, life begins at 40, but when you hit the big 4-0, you need to be thinking about getting tested for diabetes, especially if you have more risk factors.

Are Diabetes Tests Getting Better?

Dr. Manchanda confirms that diabetes tests have got better because we have the HBA1C test. This has a better way of looking at your sugar levels over a longer period of time, compared to the traditional glucose test. So, unlike before, when people could eat well for a few days in order to pass the test, this test looks back at your blood sugar levels over the past three months, making it very hard to fudge!

It starts with early detection, which is why Dr. Manchanda tells you to talk to your doctors about it, get active, lose weight, control your sugar intake, and control other forms of high-sugar intake, e.g. carbs.

How Does Diabetes Affect Our Heart Health?

Using his heart house analogy, Dr. Manchanda suggests that contributing risk factors to the plumbing of our heart (our arteries), are things like age and high blood pressure. But if you start adding sugar water to these pipes, which is sticky, it’s going to take the circulating fat and stick it right to the walls of the arteries. That’s why diabetes is the number one cause of heart disease. And cigarettes have the same effect, so when you add sugar, fat, and old plumbing (age) to this, it’s a recipe for disaster.

During some of his research, Dr. Manchanda found that people with diabetes are at 20 times the risk of suffering from heart disease, with people with high cholesterol being at five times the risk.