Exercise and Diabetes

I recently read an article about exercise and diabetes. It was a study conducted on NFL players and their risk factors for heart disease and diabetes. The finding that was being stressed, was the fact that the blood sugars of the NFL players tended to be lower on average than men in the control group who were not particularly physically active.

I found this somewhat amusing because for one thing, the diet of NFL players tends to be very high in protein. This is to help them build muscle. Their diets tend to be less in the realm of fruits and vegetables and hence how many times have we heard that an NFL player has the flu - there are at least a couple every week. They're not building their immune systems. But that is another issue. Back to the sugar. We also know that if you are physically active and the more physically active you are, the more efficient your cells become in terms of utilizing glucose. Also muscle cells tend to use more than fat cells. So it is reasonable to believe that these fairly large NFL players who are very physically active would have lower blood sugars.

My case in point here. When I was practicing in endocrinology, I had a patient who was a world class bicyclist. He was also a Type I Diabetic. When he quit riding his bike 6-8 hours a day, and started to work in an office where he sat at a desk most of the day, his insulin requirements started to go up and his fat to lean body mass changed.

The lesson here is to get out and move!