As the Sultanate celebrates 50 years of modern renaissance if there is an area that needs extra focus by everyone it is diabetes.
Dr Noor al Busaidy, Director of National Diabetes and Endocrine Center, said diabetes is a chronic progressive disease and another twin to diabetes is obesity. Obesity causes 90 per cent of diabetes. These two diseases are preventable and a lot can be done for prevention and management as well as awareness.
“We need to teach children, the women and schools. Health practices should be everywhere in our schools, workplace, in our home. This responsibility is not just the responsibility of the Ministry of Health, it is everyone’s responsibility.”
As the public, have we done enough?
“Statistics tell us that around 40 per cent of our nation is overweight or obese and 26 per cent is diabetic with pre-diabetes reaching 30 per cent. We need to do more measures addressing prevention, prevention and prevention.”
So should education start from within the family?
“I think women are the key to everything — women running the home, women buying the things, women at school so we need to focus on women. Women bring children to the world. So when we empower women and make them healthy their offspring will be healthy. They will implant this in their kids, schools and everywhere,” pointed out Dr Noor.
The changes in the body due to diabetes start way before the symptoms are diagnosed.
“We take pre-diabetes very seriously as well as pre-hypertension and overweight. We do not start after diagnosis, instead we start way before and when a patient is diagnosed with diabetes, they should not ignore it because they do not have complication; it is just that they do not know when the complication will hit them because it can be very sudden and traumatic,” said Dr Noor.
A misconception has been that once diagnosed one cannot come out of diabetes.
“There is a lot of hope. We see a lot of patients at the National Diabetes and Endocrine Center who are highly dependent on insulin and with morbid obesity who change by implementing a healthy lifestyle and changing how they eat, exercise, sleeping pattern and how they manage stress and taking medication. We have people totally reversing diabetes... so management of chronic disease is not acute. It is all to do with a healthy lifestyle not dieting. This is the basic requirement of health.”
Eat a well-balanced diet, exercise every day, manage stress and sleep seven to eight hours. “We do not support people who stay up at night because there are a lot of metabolism changes that take place at night. If we do not sleep at night, our body gets stressed and cortisol is released. People who stay up late tend to eat a lot and the wrong food. Chronic stress causes the adrenal gland to produce cortisol and wherever there is cortisol, there is obesity.
“We might delay saying I will meditate later, will catch up with exercise tomorrow and take care of stress. This has to be daily practice. We can maintain health and in case we encounter disease all these parameters are maintained in order for the medicine to work,” said Dr Noor al Busaidy.
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