Chances are what you’ve been told about the cause of Type 2 diabetes is mostly wrong. If you’ve been told you have eaten yourself into obesity and diabetes, it just isn’t true. It is a terrible disease–that much is true–that can lead to amputation, blindness, heart attack death and impotence. However, it is one of the few serious chronic diseases that you can control and achieve normal health without resorting to drugs.
You should take very seriously your diagnosis of diabetes or pre-diabetes. Diabetes can cause neuropathy, a condition where the peripheral nerves are damaged causing pain and/or numbness; slow wound healing; low physical energy; kidney damage, blindness and blurred vision, and other organ damage. If your doctor has told you this, it is indeed true. Any rise in fasting blood sugar should be taken seriously.
However, if you have Type 2 diabetes and are overweight, stop kicking and blaming yourself for your lifetime of bad eating habits and weight gain. Chances are you’ve been told you got diabetes because you are overweight. It is a myth. Plenty of people are overweight and don’t develop diabetes. Also, one in five diabetics are people of normal, healthy weight.
The myth: In the past doctors and researchers thought that diabetes was caused by “insulin resistance”, a condition where the body produces more than the normal amount of insulin to lower their blood sugar, a condition caused by obesity. The stress of pumping all that insulin into your bloodstream produces a kind of burnout or fatigue.
Therefore, you get the message that you have only yourself to blame for being diabetic. Newspaper and magazine articles further this bias by reporting that Type 2 diabetes is on the rise not only among adults, but also children, due to the “obesity epidemic”. You get the message that Type 2 diabetes is just punishment for overeating, you fat slob. Sounds judgmental, doesn’t it? It couldn’t be further from the truth!
The truth: While overweight people are often insulin resistant, not everyone who is insulin resistant gets diabetes. The majority of people who are overweight will never develop diabetes! That bears repeating: The majority of people who are overweight will never develop diabetes! The fact of the matter is that overweight people may be just as insulin resistant or even more so than those who develop diabetes. So you can stop beating yourself up. You didn’t eat your way to diabetes, not that losing weight isn’t a good idea for other health risk factors, but being overweight is not the cause of diabetes, but it may be a symptom that you have poor carbohydrate metabolism. In fact, most diabetics experience sugar metabolism problems before becoming overweight.
Researchers are now finding that certain genetic flaws are a contributing cause of Type 2 diabetes. They found in a study of identical twins that if one twin got Type 2 diabetes, the other had a 4 out of 5 chance of getting it too. Non-identical twins do not have the same risk factor, making any argument that the twins were fed the same foods by their mother and developed the same unhealthy eating habits obsolete. The fact, though, that one in five of the identical twins does not get diabetes indicates that there are other environmental factors to consider.
The flawed genes cause beta cells to produce less insulin. Beta cells are responsible for creating and releasing the hormones insulin and amylin, which serve to regulate glucose levels in the blood. Beta cells constitute 65 to 80 percent of the cells in the islets of Langerhans, the endocrine structures in the pancreas. In addition to the hormones they produce, beta cells also release a byproduct of insulin production called C-peptide, which aids in repair of the muscular layers of the arteries, thereby preventing neuropathy and similar complications of vascular deterioration. Therefore, Type 2 diabetes is not from “insulin resistance” or insulin fatigue, but your beta cells actually secrete less insulin because of the damaged genes.
Here is where it gets interesting. There is quite a list of genes associated with risk for Type 2 diabetes and the list is growing; in different races the diabetic genes are a different set of genes from Caucasians of European descent. Whether you get diabetes or not also depends on how many of the flawed genes a person has and perhaps even which particular genes are affected. The more diabetes genes you have the worse your beta cells perform in secreting insulin. Having the diabetic genes does not always mean you will get it.
Another connection that researchers have discovered is that between our Circadian clock and diabetes. People with sleep disturbances often have raised blood sugar levels. Melatonin levels control our body clock, which in turn regulates our insulin secretion, among other body processes.
What causes the abnormalities is different with every person. It may be that the cells that secrete insulin have become poisoned by exposure to chemicals or certain drugs, excessive stress. The cells either die or fail to respond to the body’s need for insulin. About 1 in 12 of those with type 2 diabetes have markers in their bloodstream that they have been the victim of an autoimmune attack that has killed off the cells making insulin. Other times problems with the adrenal glands or with hormones in the gut that signal the body there is food there have caused the overload of sugar in the bloodstream. It’s also possible a person has more than one of these factors.
Therefore, while all diabetics share too much glucose in the bloodstream as a symptom, the cause of diabetes is very individualistic. Your diabetes is not the same as mine, nor is either of ours the same as a friend or the neighbor down the street. Because of that we each need to learn how our own version of diabetes works. That requires educating ourselves.
One of the wonderful things about the Internet is that we have a resource to educate ourselves about our disease. One site I have found particularly helpful is bloodsugar101.com. There are some great pdf files you can download onto your computer or you can order Jenny Ruhl’s book Blood Sugar 101: What They Don’t Tell You About DIABETES from Amazon.com. I downloaded her book to my kindle. Her information is not so much what you can eat as it is helpful to understand diabetes and how you can monitor and control it. On her website she discusses the latest research and findings.
Better Homes and Gardens network has a magazine and website just for diabetics: http://www.diabeticlivingonline.com/. The magazine is Diabetic Living, available at $1.75 an issue for your kindle or other ereader when you subscribe. Both are a great resource for recipes and meal planning. I’ve just downloaded their pdf file for a workbook: Take Control Diabetes Workbook to both my kindle and my computer. Also sign up for their newsletter.
Now while overeating and leading a sedentary lifestyle did not cause your diabetes, losing weight and exercising can certainly help it. Besides, with obesity come other risk factors that are exacerbated by your diabetes. So take control of your health. Many who do that reverse their diabetes and no longer have to take insulin.
P.S. I’ve lost 15 pounds since being told I have pre-diabetes last August. I’m still working on finding out how to eat to stabilize my blood sugar. Get yourself a meter. Jenny recommends taking a fasting blood sugar reading, one an hour and another at 2 hours after eating. On her website there is a pdf download of a flyer to help you control your blood sugar. http://www.phlaunt.com/diabetes/flyer.pdf
