Since the world is turning diabetic and on track to bankrupt the healthcare system in a decade or two, it helps to recognize a few facts about "diabetes". Firs

Since the world is turning diabetic and on track to bankrupt the healthcare system in a decade or two, it helps to recognize a few facts about "diabetes". First, realize that "prediabetic"/"diabetic" is just a stupid number in A1c or glucose tolerance where recommended care is to start giving you drugs. It doesn't mean the glucose level in your blood isn't destroying your body before you reach that level. Metabolic syndrome is a range of insulin resistance, and the sooner you reverse it, the better. Don't wait for some doctor to tell you after two or three decades of slowly increasing insulin resistance that, "Now, we will do something." There is growing evidence that Alzheimer's should be renamed Type 3 diabetes, and some questions about Parkinson's being Type 4 diabetes. The brain is specially sensitive to excess glucose, and special sets of cells are more sensitive than other neurons (like in Parkinson's). So how to measure insulin resistance? The gold standards is a continuous glucose monitor ($500). Then the glucose tolerance test (not the overnight fast), which takes hours and involves ingesting slugs of glucose and sampling blood over time. Ideally we would directly measure insulin in the blood, not glucose, but that is much harder so far. One new test that holds out the hope of predicting diabetes years or even decades down the road is the LabCorp NMR LipoProfile with Graph[0][1]. Not yet FDA approved for diagnosis, this cheap test ($40 Medicare reimbursement) calculates an insulin resistance score that can be tracked year by year. I first learned of this test in an article in Managed Care Magazine, which seems to have gone out of business, leaving only a PubMed blurb pointing to it[2]. I was interested enough in my numbers that I paid for my own test, about $90 after Black Friday discount, in November 2018 at WalkInLab[3]. [0] https://www.labcorp.com/tests/123810/nmr-lipoprofile-with-lipids-with-graph https://www.labcorp.com/tests/123810/nmr-lipoprofile-with-li... [1] https://www.labcorp.com/tests/related-documents/L15035 https://www.labcorp.com/tests/related-documents/L15035 [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29701589/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29701589/ [3] https://www.walkinlab.com/products/view/nmr-lipoprofile-blood-test https://www.walkinlab.com/products/view/nmr-lipoprofile-bloo...