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Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which your immune system destroys insulin-producing cells in your pancreas. Early diagnosis is crucial for this type of diabetes as it has a tendency to progress quickly and can result in serious long-term complications like blindness, heart disease, kidney failure, and stroke.
Type 1 diabetes patients do not produce insulin and need to inject insulin several times a day to survive. While this disease is far less common than type 2 diabetes (which is caused by insulin resistance and faulty leptin signaling), its incidence rate is steadily rising.
A Lancet study showed that the number of children below the age of five with type 1 diabetes is expected to double between 2005 and 2020. Cases among children younger than 15 are expected to rise by 70 percent during this time.
If you’re a parent or planning to have children, what can you do to reduce your child’s risk of this disease? Here are Dr. Mercola’s four steps to help prevent type 1 diabetes:
1. Optimize your child’s vitamin D levels.
According to Dr. Michael Holick, one of the world’s leading vitamin D experts, children who take a vitamin D supplement from age 1 onwards reduce their risk of developing type 1 diabetes by 80 percent.
Studies also show that pregnant women who are deficient in vitamin D could increase their child’s risk of developing type 1 diabetes. Based on the latest research, Dr. Mercola recommends 35 IUs (international units) of vitamin D3 per pound of body weight. This translates to:
• 35 IUs per pound per day for children below 5
• 2500 IUs for children between the ages of 5 to 10
• 5000 IUs for adults ages 18 to 30
• 5000 IUs for pregnant women
Remember: these recommendations are only an estimate because it’s just not possible to make a blanket recommendation that will cover everyone’s needs. The only way to determine how much vitamin D you need is to get your blood tested, Dr. Mercola explains. The correct vitamin D test to order is the 25(OH)D or 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which you can get through Lab Corp. The dosage recommendations for vitamin D supplementation are updated depending on the latest research. Click here to check the updated values.
2. Breastfeed your baby.
Bottle-fed infants tend to grow faster, but this is not a good thing. Babies that gain a lot of weight in their first year may have an increased risk of type 1 diabetes. Dr. Mercola also recommends breast milk over milk-based formula because exposure to pasteurized cow’s milk early in life may increase a child’s risk of type 1 diabetes.
3. Avoid feeding cereal to your infant.
Cereal is typically one of the first solid foods to be introduced to babies when they reach the 4-to-6 month mark. But grains are not a healthy choice for most people, including infants. Babies who are given cereal may also increase their risk of type 1 diabetes. Give your child a vegetable source of carbohydrates instead.
4. Do some research before deciding on vaccinating your infant.
Speculation is rife that the rising incidences of autoimmune diseases in children are a result of the growing number of vaccinations received. Dr. Donald W. Miller points out that there has been a 17-fold increase in type 1 diabetes -- from 1 in 7,100 children in the 1950s to 1 in 400 today.
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1 comments:
If I had it to do over, my daughter's first food would have been some kind of *meat.* I'm not clear on why a breastfed baby would need to start on a carbohydrate food when there's already lots of lactose in milk. And plant foods are often starchy (starch turns to even more sugar), and nearly all plant parts have some kind of chemical defense mechanism going on. Whether that's still present in the finished food depends largely on how the plant food is prepared.
Oh to have known all that stuff back then...
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