How Do You Get Diabetes? Four Lesser-Known Causes

Eating too many carbs and excess weight aren't the only causes of diabetes. Here are four other risk factors of type 2 diabetes that you might not know much about.

Do you know if your blood sugar levels are healthy? How do you get diabetes if they aren't?

More than one in three of all Americans have prediabetes — blood sugar levels that are higher than normal but not enough to be classified as type 2 diabetes. Unless they lose weight and exercise more, about 25 percent of people with prediabetes will develop type 2 diabetes within five years.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: 8 of 10 People with Prediabetes Don’t Know They Have It

How do you get diabetes?

The familiar explanation for what causes type 2 diabetes is that you ate too much junk carbohydrates — soda and other sweets, as well as white bread and potatoes — and became too fat, making your body less responsive to insulin, the body chemical that manages blood sugar levels. While it’s still essential to limit or eliminate risky foods to maintain your health, other factors also play a role in diabetes.

1. Inflammation heightens the risk of diabetes

Inflammation is your body’s response to a threat. Air pollution, gum disease, a poor diet, and obesity  can create persistent, low-level inflammation in your body.

If you are fat in the middle, it’s especially important to lose weight. Most belly fat is ectopic fat, which secretes inflammatory chemicals and hides in your muscles and liver. Ectopic fat is one reason obese men are about seven times more likely to get diabetes than men in a normal weight range. Obese women are 12 times more at risk.

2. Your genes make a difference

You can be pre-diabetic or even diabetic without being obese, if you have a genetic tendency to develop ectopic fat.

Some obese people don’t have the tendency towards ectopic fat and have less risk of diabetes. Losing weight, especially around their bellies, however, will still help protect them from the disease and improve their health in many other ways as well. To lose invisible ectopic fat, people generally need to lose visible fat, too.

3. Mitochondria problems

These batteries in your cells generate waste products, including free radicals, kept in check by antioxidants. You’ve probably seen the word antioxidants on vitamin labels. If you are short on antioxidants, your mitochondria don’t work as well and will produce less of the insulin you need to manage your blood sugar.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Losing Weight Can Reverse Type 2 Diabetes

4. Emotional stress can feed diabetes

People who have experienced at least one major unhappy event, like serious financial troubles, divorce, or bereavement, are more likely to develop diabetes within the next five years.

Depression, anger, anxiety, and sleeping problems are all associated with diabetes, too. Stress raises your level of the hormone cortisol, which can influence your liver to produce too much blood sugar. Stressed people are also more likely to gain weight, eat poorly, and skip exercise.

When you’re stressed, the last thing you want to hear from your doctor is that you need to lose weight or that you’ll get sick. But don’t ignore that advice. Over time, uncontrolled high blood sugar can damage your eyes.

How to prevent diabetes

George King, MD, chief scientific officer at Harvard’s Diabetes Center and the co-author of “The Diabetes Reset,” points out that you can cut your risk dramatically if you increase your exercise and change your diet. Changing your habits even a bit may seem inconvenient and time-consuming, but diabetes will be much more so. The illness is far harder to deal with than lifestyle changes that can prevent it.

Small changes can make a big difference. The landmark Diabetes Prevention Program study, which followed more than 3,200 volunteers with prediabetes for three years, concluded that people who lost just 5 to 7 percent of their body weight (that’s 12.5 pounds for a 180-pound person) and increased their exercise lowered their chances of developing diabetes by almost 60 percent.

One rule-of-thumb is to reserve:

• Half of your plate for vegetables and fruit
• One-fourth for lean protein like chicken, fish, or lean red meat
• One-fourth for complex grains and legumes

Keep fat to 15 percent of all your calories.

Exercise for half an hour five days a week. Even a brisk walk will help reduce your diabetes risk.

Skip the vitamins. Although millions of Americans take antioxidant vitamins — vitamin C and E, in particular — research indicates that supplements probably don’t help and may trick your body into suppressing its natural antioxidants.

Instead of taking vitamins, eat foods known to be high in compounds that trigger those natural oxidants. Drink green tea or eat broccoli or blueberries.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Bariatric Surgery Can Reverse Type 2 Diabetes