eating couch potatoes.

Wake up. It's time to put your plump rump into high gear if you want to avoid creeping death from diseases such as sugar diabetes.

Speaking to a luncheon meeting of the Hamilton Rotary Club Ms Jones, coordinator of King Edward VII Memorial Hospital's Diabetes Centre, marked November as "Diabetes Awareness'' month by updating Rotarians on a current epidemiological study conducted on Island residents between February and November.

The results of the study she said, will determine the incidence of types one and two diabetes on the Island, and will be made public soon.

Diabetes says Ms Jones, is really two different diseases. Type-one is the most well-known; it occurs when the pancreas cannot produce enough insulin and its causes remain a mystery.

Type-two is linked largely to a high-fat, low-exercise lifestyle and, Ms Jones estimates, somewhere between 15-20 percent of Bermudians have it, with the Island's black community suffering a higher incidence.

"We don't know why that is so but studies to answer that are going on at Harvard and Howard (Universities) as to why,'' she said.

For the study some 3,000 residents were randomly drawn from the voters lists and of that 1,300 eventually agreed to participate. They were interviewed on lifestyle and diet and consented to blood tests.

The study, said Ms Jones, was sparked when staff at the Centre began to notice a trend in the type of people suffering diabetes.

"We started noticing we were getting younger and younger people with type-two diabetes, and it was totally because of poor eating habits and a lack of exercise.'' Staff focused on the inter-relationship between lifestyle and diabetes.

"There are some people around the world who say we're in the middle of a diabetes pandemic. It's certainly an epidemic,'' she said.

As we move forward technologically we are in danger of moving backwards physically: "Basically we need to put more exercise into our lives,'' she told the luncheon group.

Symptoms of type-two diabetes are vague and can range from unquenchable thirst, excessive need to go to the bathroom, tiredness, itchy skin, blurred vision, and susceptibility to infection.

Unfortunately in many cases people don't even know they have the disease and if left untreated type-two diabetes can have a devastating effect on health.

"Forty-eight percent of people on (kidney/renal) dialysis have type-two diabetes. It's one of the leading contributors for blindness and it's one of the leading causes of amputation,'' she said.

HEALTH HTH