Diabetes types 1 and 2

Everyone hears about Type 2 diabetes from the news, from magazines, from television. Type 2 is related to lifestyle choices, by all accounts. It can often be managed by reversing those choices. But Type 1 doesn't get so much coverage, because it is more rare and maybe because it affects children more than adults, at least in its initial diagnosis. As I have already written, my 8 year old grandson has Type 1 diabetes. We found out when he was 4. No lifestyle choices make any difference in whether a person gets Type 1 diabetes or not. No lifestyle choices can reverse it. It just appears, and while researchers have a lot of theories, they don't really know why any individual becomes diabetic. All that is well and good, but unfortunately for people like my grandson, since newscasters and others don't differentiate when they talk about diabetes between type 1 and type 2, people who don't know any better could get the impression that somehow all people who have diabetes have it because of their own actions. And considering the state of health care in this country, and the problems convincing people that universal health care should be an important issue, the difference might matter.