Type 2 diabetes could be reduced with regular exercise and balanced diet

Nuffield Health, UK healthcare charity, agrees that the rise in people under 40 years of age with type 2 diabetes highlights a considerable risk to the health and welfare of the UK.

Dr Lucy Goundry, Medical Director – Wellbeing, Nuffield Health, says: “Obesity and a sedentary lifestyle are both major factors in the rise of type 2 diabetes. Recent research from Nuffield Health with the London School of Economics highlighted the benefit of regular exercise on reducing the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. We found that the average adult needs to do just 12 minutes more exercise a day to reach the recommended 150 minutes per week. Our experience in health and fitness shows that once the good habit to regularly exercise is made, it stays with you for life. So we encourage parents, schools, health professionals and anyone working with children to help them gain experience of different types of exercise and with it a lifelong love of activity. This would therefore help to reverse this worrying trend of more people at a younger age being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

“At Nuffield Health we offer free health MOTs to all new members, a 12 point measure of overall health and fitness, in 2012 we found 2.61% of adults under 40 years of age had a raised glucose level during their health MOT. We automatically flagged this to the individual and recommended they visited their GP before continuing. We know that prevention is the best way to better health, so our team of experts from GPs to nutritional therapists help people to make healthy lifestyle choice and be the best they can be.”