Travis Stork of 'The Doctors' says it's important to 'control your diabetes' — now, more than ever

Reporting by Jacquie Cosgrove

Living with diabetes has its challenges, but it can be especially difficult during a global pandemic. “With diabetes, you have a compromised immune system,” ER doctor Travis Stork, host of The Doctors and creator of the podcast The Travis Stork Show, tells Yahoo Life.

More than 34 million Americans have diabetes, according to the American Diabetes Association (ADA), and 88 million Americans have prediabetes, a condition where a person’s blood sugar is elevated, but not high enough to be considered diabetes.

Of the millions of adults who have diabetes, more than 7 million are undiagnosed, the ADA reports. “The most likely symptom is nothing,” Stork says. “It’s pretty scary.”

How does diabetes affect the body?

As a whole, having diabetes means that there is either an issue with the way insulin acts in the body or the body doesn’t make enough insulin, says Stork. “What insulin does is it helps your cells throughout your body use the sugar in your blood for energy,” he explains.

But there are different forms of diabetes:

Type 1 diabetes: “Type 1 diabetes typically happens when you’re younger,” Stork says. When someone has type 1 diabetes, their pancreas doesn’t make enough insulin. “They need insulin as a prescription medicine to help lower blood glucose levels.”

Type 2 diabetes: “What it really means is your body is still making insulin, but your body’s cells are not as sensitive to it,” says Stork. “You can’t get that sugar into your body’s cells and, instead, it hang out in your blood.” That can lead to serious health conditions like heart disease, kidney disease and even blindness.

Lifestyle modifications can help for people with Type 2 diabetes.

Stork says that blood glucose levels “can be really responsive” to certain lifestyle modifications. Those include:

Exercising regularly. “Exercise tells your muscle cells to gobble up glucose,” he says. “Your body can become more efficient at using insulin and you can naturally lower your blood glucose levels.”

Eating well. Stork recommends skipping refined carbohydrates like white bread and white pasta in favor of fiber-packed whole grain versions.

Taking the right medications. “The right medication regimen alone can prove quite beneficial,” says Stork.

Even if you do everything right, the doctor notes there’s still a chance you can have high blood sugar. “But it is treatable if proper steps are taken,” he adds.

Now, Stork recommends that people “use this time to hit that reset button,” including eating a healthier diet, getting more active and working with your physician on taking the right medication. “You’ll have more power than you ever thought imaginable helping to control your diabetes,” he says.