When it comes to your body, you probably spend more time thinking about your hair
than your hormones. For some people, though, a problem with a hormone
called insulin causes a health condition called type 2 diabetes (pronounced:
dye-uh-BEE-tees).
What Is Diabetes?

Diabetes is a disease that affects how the body uses glucose
(pronounced: GLOO-kose), a sugar that is the body's main source of fuel. Your body
needs glucose to keep running. Here's how it should work:
- You eat.
- Glucose from the food gets into your bloodstream.
- Your pancreas makes a hormone called insulin
(pronounced: IN-suh-lin).
- Insulin helps the glucose get into the body's cells.
- Your body gets the energy it needs.
The pancreas is a long, flat
gland in your belly that helps your body digest food. It also makes insulin. Insulin
is like a key that opens the doors to the cells of the body. It lets the glucose in.
Then the glucose can move out of the blood and into the cells.
But if someone has diabetes, either the body can't make insulin or the insulin
doesn't work in the body like it should. The glucose can't get into the cells normally,
so the blood sugar level
gets too high. Lots of sugar in the blood makes people sick if they don't get treatment.
What Is Type 2 Diabetes?
There are two major types of diabetes: type 1 and type 2. Each type causes high
blood sugar levels in a different way.
In type 1 diabetes, the pancreas
can't make insulin. The body can still get glucose from food, but the glucose can't
get into the cells, where it's needed, and glucose stays in the blood. This makes
the blood sugar level very high.
With type 2 diabetes, the body still makes insulin. But a person with type 2 diabetes
doesn't respond normally to the insulin the body makes. So glucose is less able to
enter the cells and do its job of supplying energy.
When glucose can't enter the cells in this way, doctors call it insulin
resistance. Although there's plenty of insulin in the person's body, because it
doesn't work properly, the pancreas still detects high blood sugar levels. This makes
the pancreas produce even more insulin.
The pancreas may eventually wear out from working overtime to produce extra insulin.
When this happens, it may no longer be able to produce enough insulin to keep blood
sugar levels where they should be. In general, when someone's blood sugar levels are
repeatedly high, it's a sign that he or she has diabetes.