Longevity is not a starry-eyed, wish-upon-the-star goal for someone with diabetes. As a matter of fact, it is possible for diabetics to live until or beyond the age of 100. The secret? A controlled blood sugar level.

High blood sugar and longevity are dialectic. Meaning, they do not go together. If you consistently struggle with high blood sugar level, more or less, witnessing your 100 years on earth will be farfetched.

High blood sugar either due to low insulin production or to the energy-storing cell’s inability to recognize the presence of insulin is the cause of type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes, responsible for 90 to 95 percent of all identified cases of diabetes in the country, is the seventh deadliest disease in America.

In 2007 alone, diabetes was identified as either the underlying or contributing cause of 231, 404 deaths in the country.

In 2010, 10.9 million Americans at least 65 years old were diagnosed with diabetes while around 1.9 million Americans who are at least 20 years old had the disease.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as of 2010, there were 25.8 million Americans afflicted with diabetes. Of the figure, seven million were undiagnosed.

Diabetes is now considered an epidemic, which snips at least 11 years from a person’s lifetime. Aside from obesity, diabetes can also lead to depression, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer.

But wait, before you pop up a diabetes pill so as to control your blood sugar level, here is another antithesis to longevity: diabetes drugs specifically thiazolidinediones (TZDs).

With high confidence on TZDs’ insulin-sensitizing effect, health care providers started prescribing Avandia (rosiglitazone) and Actos (pioglitazone). The move yielded Actos more than $4 billion in sales annually.

Avandia and Actos became easy moneymaking machines until a series of clinical studies revealed they were deadly.

In September 2010, the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) severed Avandia’s use due to its cardiovascular risk.

In the process of lowering the blood glucose, Avandia can also lower hemoglobin at a dangerous level, which may lead to ischemia. Ischemia is a condition characterized by the scarcity of glucose and oxygen in the blood affecting punitively the function of body tissues. Hemoglobin transports oxygen from the respiratory organs to the rest of the body. Adverse heart-related conditions can result from the lack of oxygen in the blood.

Avandia maker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is now facing more than 13 thousand lawsuits.

Expectedly, Actos has the same cardiovascular risk as Avandia with bladder cancer as a bonus. Actos also carries the risk for rhabdomyolysis, edema, bone fracture, and obesity.

As early as 2001, a year after Rezulin (troglitazone) was withdrawn from the U.S. market, Health Canada has already found Actos’ Avandia-like side effect. It was, however, not until 2011 when the FDA made a move to require maker Takeda to update the drug’s label and insert. Currently, despite the Actos bladder cancer link, the drug can still be prescribed without restriction. Another TZD, Rezulin was linked to liver failure.

More than a hundred former users have decided to file an Actos lawsuit, against Takeda the maker of the drug.  It is expected that Takeda may face several thousand similar cases.

Now, you will probably ask, what options are left for me to control my blood sugar level?

There are a lot of inexpensive measures, which are effective and are without debilitating side effects. These cost-effective measures include a healthy diet, regular exercise, and natural medicine. So far, a vast number of resources have been devoted in the discussion of the importance of diet and exercise in the control of blood sugar level. That leaves us to one less-discussed measure: natural medicine. Natural medicine and its ability to reverse insulin resistance safely will be discussed in the second part of this article.