Background and Purpose: Long-term complications of diabetes have encouraged scientists to develop comprehensive investigations for the prevention and control of diabetes. At this juncture, diet and lifestyle changes as well as physical activity are the main solutions. Iranian Traditional Medicine (ITM) with a thousand years of experience has paid special attention to health care principles which are known as “Sete Zarorie”. They have been frequently recommended to reduce or eliminate the risk of diabetes.
Material and Methods: In this review article, all the corresponding texts in traditional medicine and modern medicine were comprehensively studied. For this purpose, important Iranian traditional medicine references such as the Al Qanun-fil-Tibb, Tibb Akbari, Gharayez-al-Tabieh, Hefz-al-Sehe Naseri, Kholaseh-al-Hekmah, Mofaereh-al-Gholob, Alhavi-fil-Tibb as well as scientific data bases such as Iranmedex, Cochrane, CRD, Embase, Pub Med, SID, MEDLIN, Scopus, and Google Scholar using key words like “lifestyle”, “hyperglycemia”, “diabetes”, “fast blood sugar”, “prevention”, and “non-medicine” were carefully reviewed and the corresponding papers were studied. Two researchers reviewed the literature individually and the corresponding articles were studied and analyzed.
Results: It was found that the most solutions for the prevention and control of diabetes including suitable diet, weight loss, physical activity, and improving personal and sleep habits are same in both traditional and modern medicines. It should be noted that suitable solutions in ITM are recommended focusing on the “temperament”.
Conclusion: Considering the fact that recommended solutions for the prevention and control of diabetes in ITM are user-friendly, they deserve to be performed in the society under supervision of related specialists.