What is diabetes?

Diabetes is a condition that affects how the body uses sugar. Sugar is the body’s main source of fuel. Your body needs sugar for energy.

Here is how your body's digestion should work:

1. You eat food with carbohydrate.
2. Carbohydrate breaks down into sugar and gets into your bloodstream.
3. Your pancreas, inside your belly, makes a hormone called insulin.
4. Insulin helps the sugar get into your body’s cells.
5. Your body gets the energy it needs.

Insulin is like a key that opens the doors to the cells of the body. Then sugar can move out of the blood and into the cells.

There are two types of diabetes:

• Type 1 diabetes
• Type 2 diabetes

They are different because they make the blood sugar go too high in different ways. The body either can’t make insulin or the insulin does not work in the body like it should. Sugar can’t get into the cells, so the blood sugar gets too high. Lots of sugar in the blood makes people sick if they don’t get treatment.