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Hello everyone! Today, I’m going to be talking about type 1 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is a diabetes type that prevents the body from creating insulin.  Insulin is like the fuel of your body. Your body makes this fuel with food. Type 1 diabetes is caused by an immune reaction to insulin creating cells in your pancreas. You see, some cells in your adaptive immune system can attack their own cells. So when antibodies are created that destroy insulin creating cells, this leads to type 1 diabetes. 

 With type 1 diabetes, it gets harder to do physical exercise, unless you take an insulin injection.  The doctors that treat diabetes are called endocrinologists. My mom is actually one. You can also stop Type 1 Diabetes by eating healthy food. Your diet actually controls the majority of your body. That’s why 40% of the immune cells in your body are stationed in the intestines. But that is, because there’s also like a hundred trillion species of bacteria in the intestines. This is known as your microbiome. Obviously we’ll have to discuss this in a different blog post, but your diet is also what your cells use to create insulin. 

Once, I met a kid who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. If you are diagnosed with diabetes, you have to wear an insulin pump at school (if you are still in school and have completed it)and everywhere else., and have a glucose meter. Diabetes just completely changes your entire life if you get it. The glucose meter is to check your blood sugar, because that’s also another factor in your diabetes(1&2). Before insulin was invented, diabetes was a death sentence, as there was no treatment for it. Insulin is actually a Canadian invention. It was made at the University of Toronto. In fact, the inventors of insulin got a Nobel Prize for it in 1923.

 Fun fact, Alfred Nobel is the deceased inventor of the Nobel Prize and dynamite. Nobody blames him for creating an explosive, because he probably created it with good intentions and not thinking that crazy people would use it to blow up stuff other than mine shafts to make them bigger.

Can you imagine what would happen if you were diagnosed with diabetes, any type, and you couldn’t get insulin? You would probably just eventually die because of it. We should all be thankful to the people who made insulin. More than 300,000 Canadians suffer from type 1 diabetes, which is around 1%of the entire population of Canada. That wraps up all the things I wanted to tell you about, so see you guys later, goodbye everyone!