How many Canadians live with diabetes? 

In 2019, 7.3% of Canadians aged 12 and older (roughly 2.3 million people) reported being diagnosed with diabetes. Between 2018 and 2019, the proportion of males who reported being diagnosed with diabetes increased from 7.6% in 2016 to 8.4% in 2019. The proportion of females remained consistent between the two years.

Canadians with type 1 diabetes have been living with their diagnosis for an average of 20.2 years, compared to 12.2 years for type 2 diabetes.

Overall, males (8.4%) were more likely than females (6.3%) to report that they had diabetes. Diabetes increased with age for males, with the highest prevalence among those 75 years and older. The percentage of females reporting diabetes increased with age up to the age of 64, the prevalence did not increase significantly for those aged 75 and older. 

 How to live with Diabetes.

 If type 2 diabetes were an infectious disease, passed from one person to another, public health officials would say we’re in the midst of an epidemic. This difficult disease is striking an ever-growing number of adults, and with the rising rates of childhood obesity, it has become more common in youth, especially among certain ethnic groups (learn more about diabetes, including the other types and risk factors).

 The good news is that prediabetes and types 2 diabetes is largely preventable by making lifestyle changes. These same changes can also lower the chances of developing heart disease and some cancers. The key to prevention can be boiled down to five words: Stay lean and stay active.

 Control your weight

Excess weight is the single most important cause of type 2 diabetes. Being overweight increases the chances of developing type 2 diabetes seven-fold. Being obese makes you 20 to 40 times more likely to develop diabetes than someone with a healthy weight.

 Losing weight can help if your weight is above the healthy-weight range. Losing 7-10% of your current weight can cut your chances of developing type 2 diabetes in half.

 Get moving—and turn off the television

Inactivity promotes type 2 diabetes. [2] Working your muscles more often and making them work harder improves their ability to use insulin and absorb glucose. This puts less stress on your insulin-making cells. So trade some of your sit-time for fit-time.

 Long bouts of hot, sweaty exercise aren’t necessary to reap this benefit. Findings from the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study suggest that walking briskly for a half-hour every day reduces the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 30%. [3,4] More recently, The Black Women’s Health Study reported similar diabetes-prevention benefits for brisk walking of more than 5 hours per week. [5] This amount of exercise has a variety of other benefits as well. And even greater cardiovascular and other advantages can be attained by more, and more intense, exercise.

 Television-watching appears to be an especially-detrimental form of inactivity: Every two hours you spend watching TV instead of pursuing something more active increases the chances of developing diabetes by 20%; it also increases the risk of heart disease (15%) and early death (13%). The more television people watch, the more likely they are to be overweight or obese, and this seems to explain part of the TV viewing-diabetes link. The unhealthy diet patterns associated with TV watching may also explain some of this relationship.

Author: Marcos Capriles