Diabetes is essentially too much sugar in the blood. It happens when your pancreas produces either no insulin or insufficient or ineffective insulin, the hormone that stimulates cells to absorb and store glucose (sugar). If the insulin can't handle glucose, blood sugar levels rise abnormally, causing much havoc, including excessive urination and thirst, weakness, fatigue and cardiovascular and kidney damage.

There are two main types of diabetes. The more severe, less common Type I diabetes strikes children and sometimes young adults, usually under age thirty-five. Since cells of the pancreas that secrete insulin are gradually destroyed, presumably by some sort of immune reaction, Type I diabetics must take insulin injections because their pancreas produces vitually no insulin. Type I is also known as insulin - dependent diabetes or juvenile diabetes.

A far wider threat to most Americans is Type II diabetes, which almost always develops after age forty. Ironically, people with this type diabetes often have lots of insulin, but it doesn't perform well because cell are "resistant" to it. Such diabetes, also called non-insulin-dependent or adult-onset, accounts for 90 pervent of all cases, afflecting some twelve million Americans, perhaps as many as half who do not knowq they have it.

Since what you eat has a major impact on blood sugar and insulin, food is a prime player in triggering, exacerbating and controlling diabetes.

• Overloads of certain foods that cause sharp spurts of blood sugar put burdens on insulin; restricting such foods keeps blood sugar levels more even.
• Certain foods contain compounds that stimulate the activity and potency of insulin or act directly to regulate blood sugar.
• Antioxidants in food, such as vitamin C and E, may ward off free radical attacks on beta cells that worsen inflamation and other damage. Such antioxidants also counteract oxidation of diabetic's LDL cholesterol, which is more susceptible to harm than that of non diabetic individuals. Type II diabetics are two to three times more vulnerable to heart disease than non diabetics.
• Especially intriguing is the prospect that the onset of Type I diabetes may be fostered by very complex delayed "allergic reactions" to food constituents, such as proteins in milk.

The development of diabetes is complex and ill understood. But current therory holds that you are born with a vulnerability to diabetes, and then something in the environment, including diet, sets in motion events that trigger overt symptoms of the disease.

Diet and diabetes have always been intimately connected, perhaps not surprisingly, because diabetes is a disorder of the pancreas, the gland the produces insulin, which is required to turn food into energy. First, your stomach breaks down carbohydrates into glucose, a common sugar. The pancreas responds by turning out insulin needed to transport the glucose from the blood stream into the muscles, where it is stored or converted to energy. At one time eating too much sugar was thought to cause diabets, but no longer. The development of diabetes is far more complex and still very mysterious. Bu it does not happen overnight. It usually takes years to develop. During that critical phase, your food choices can help defeat a genetic susceptibility to diabetes.

Don't give infants cows milk, especially if there is a history of diabetes in the family. As fantastic as it may seem, drinking cow's milk during infancy may trigger Type I diabetes years later in genetically prone youngsters. This suggests juvenile diabetes is a vicious type of "food alergy." It also means that keeping infants away from dairy foods in the first year of life, probably the most critical period, might save numerious children from the fate of diabetes.

Evedence that milk can incite juvenal diabetes is mounting. Here's how experts think it happens: Certain proteins in cow's milk provide the antigen (foreign substance) that fools the immune system into attaching its own tissue -- in this case, the crucial beta cells in the pancreas, destroying those cells' ability to make insulin. Indeed, a new study by Hans-Michael Dosch and colleagues at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto has descovered antibodies, inding an immune reaction to specific milk proteins, in the blook of 100 percent of a group of children with Type I diabetes. Only 2.5 pervent of non diabetic children in the study had such antibodies. The researchers have no doubts that the proteins could have triggered allergic immune reactions leading to diabetes. In laboratory rats, milk proteins decidedly trigger diabetes by destroying insulin-secreting beta cells.

Further, infants who are breast-fed and deprived of cow's milk for longer periods are much less apt to develop diabetes. In another incriminating new study, researchers at Children's Hospital in Helsinki compared early exposure to cow's milk with later risk of diabetes. They found that exclusively breatfeeding infants during the first two to three months of life slashed their chances of developing diabetes by age fourteen by forty percent! Withholding cow's milk for longer periods also further reduced diabetes odds. Infants not given supplemental cow's milk-based formulas until four months of age had a 50 percent lower risk of developing diabetes.

Swedish researchers at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have also found that youngsters from birth to age fourteen who eat more high-protein, high-compex-carbohydrate foods and foods containing nitrosamines are more likely to develop diabetes. They theorize that certain proteins may directly attack the beta cells of the pancreas; for example, foods rich in complex carbohydrates, such as bread, are also often rich in wheat gliadin, a protein shown to harm beta cells in rats. Nitrodamines, cancer-causing agents sometimes found in cooked bacon, may also be toxic to beta cells, they speculated.

Type II diabetes can sneak up on you. You may not have diabetes now, but ou culd be on the verge of developing it. Being overweight is a formidable threat. Most people with such diabetes are overweight, and losing weight is usually a powerful deterrent or remidy. However, another haxard may be lurking to draw you into full-fledged diabetes. You may be one of the 25 percent normal weight Americans who have insulin resistence or insulin sensitivity, as its called.

This means that your insulin is no longr able to perform as it should. Insulin resistance is a hallmark sgn of Type II diabetes; it is also common in obesity. More alarming, it can foreshadow the development of diabetes. Insulin resistance frequently exists in people who are diagnosed with diabets a decade or so later.

Here's how it can happen: Your cells become sluggish and inefficient in responding to insulin's instructions to take up glucose. Your pancreas, then has to churn out more insulin consistantly to keep the blood sugar normal. Tired and overworked, the pancreas may finally become exhausted and unable to produce enough insulin, forcing your body to capitulate to full-fledged Type II diabetes.

Many experts are convinced that what you eat through the years can help avert the final surrender. Insulin resistance is probably inherited, but remains hidden until it is triggered by an environmental happening, most likely diet.

Much research on diet is directed toward preventing the long march from insulin resistance, or glucose intolerance, to full-blown diabetes. Eating certain foods can help keep diabetes away.

Eating fish may cut in half your chances of developing Type II diabetes. That startling fact comes from Dutch researchers at the National Institute of Public Health and Environmental Protection. They tested 175 normal healthy elderly men and women to be sure they were free of both diabetes and impared glucose tolerance, a condition that often foreshadows diabetes.

Four years later when they repeated the tests, thay found maby cases of impaired glucose tolerance. But interestingly, only 25 percent of those who regularly ate fish had developed the problem, compared with 45 percent of the non-fish eaters.

The researchers concluded that fish eaters were ony about half as likely to develop diabetes as non-fisk eaters. The clear message is that something in fish, perhaps the omega-3 type fat, seems to protect the body's ability to handle glucose, staving off diabetes. The amount of fish needed for protection was extremely small -- a mere ounce a day of lean, fatty or canned fish.

CAUTION: Diabetics should not take fish oil capsules except under a doctor's supervision. They have proved troublsome in glucose regulation for some diabetics.

Restrict fat; it can quicken your decent into diabetes. A recent study at the Universuty of Colorado Health Sciences Center found that eating an extra 40 grams of fat a day (as found in a four-once fast-food hamburger and large fries) triples your odds of developing diabetes! Excessive fat in the diet, especially saturated animal fat, seems to damage insulin's effectiveness.

Researchers at the University of Sidney in Austrailia took cells from muscles of older non-diabetic men and women undergoing surgery. They measured the saurated fatty acids in the cell membranes and tested the patients for insulin resistance. They found that the more saturated fatty acids in cells, the greater the insulin resistance. On the other hand, higher tissu levels of polyunsaturated fats, particularly fish oil, inded better insulin activity and less resistance.

In fact, the researchers also reported that feeding animals omega-3 fish oils effectively overcame their insulin resistance.

In another study, eating fat diminished the efficiency of insulin, promoting abnormally high levels of blood sugar. Jennifer Lovejoy, Pd.D., an assistant professor at Louisiana State University, studied the eating habits and insulin activity of 45 nondiabetix men and women; about half were obese and half were normal weight. Both being obese and eating more fat increased insulin resistance.

This means, says Dr. Lovejoy, that even normal individuals who eat lots of fat, notably animal fat, decrease their insulin efficiency and boost their vulnerbility to diabetes.

BOTTOM LINE - Cutting down on saturated dairy and animal fats and eating more fatty fish may help stave off diabetes.