The Dilemma: Having just finished a six-pack of Mountain Dew, a Pixy Stick the size of a walking cane, and a state fair’s worth of cotton candy, you can feel your teeth vibrating. Also, you’re vaguely worried you might be at risk for some type of diabetes—but which one?

People You Can Impress: fifth-graders who snort Fun Dip on double-dog dares

The Quick Trick: You may know Type 1 as “juvenile diabetes.” If the body is producing any insulin, it’s Type 2.

The Explanation:
Technically known as diabetes mellitus, diabetes is marked by persistent or recurring elevated levels of blood sugar. Although it can be treated with changes in diet, exercise, and the injection of insulin (more on that in a moment), diabetes is not curable. And untreated it has the potential to escalate pretty quickly. Diabetes can lead to coma, heart disease, kidney failure, blindness, amputation, and even impotence.

Type 1 diabetes has been recognized since time immemorial. Usually beginning in childhood or adolescence, a misfiring autoimmune response within the body starts destroying the pancreatic cells that create insulin, the hormone that removes glucose from the blood. Without insulin, the body suffers twofold: High blood sugar causes damage to the eyes, heart, and other organs, and poor protein synthesis leads to a general weakening of the body. In short, without insulin, you die—which is precisely what happened to all Type 1 diabetics until 1922, when two scientists, Sir Frederick Grant Banting and Charles Best, discovered insulin and its significance. And while Banting and Best could have gotten fabulously rich by patenting their discovery, they chose not to, so that relatively inexpensive insulin therapy could be immediately available worldwide. How wonderfully, amazingly Canadian of them. Ever since, Type 1 diabetes has become a chronic but not necessarily fatal disease—and while it’s no fun injecting yourself with insulin every day, it sure beats dying in your teens.

As for Type 2 diabetes, no one knew it existed until 1935, when physician Harry Himsworth identified it. Today approximately 95 percent of diabetes cases in America are Type 2. Sometimes called slow-onset diabetes, Type 2 generally appears over the course of several years. Here the body produces insulin, but cells don’t respond to it correctly. The first treatment for Type 2 diabetes is almost always a change in diet, exercise habits, and weight loss. Type 2 diabetes disproportionately affects the sedentary, obese, and elderly. And while it, too, is incurable, it can usually be controlled without insulin therapy.

All in all, you’d rather have Type 2. Type 1 diabetes decreases life expectancy by an average of 15 years, while the average Type 2 diabetic only lives 5 to 10 fewer years than a typical nondiabetic. That said, many diabetics of both types lead long and healthy lives—and Type 1ers owe it all to those selfless Canadians.