I am really tired of otherwise smart and informed people saying shit like “that giant soda is going to put you into a diabetic coma!” or when presented with a sweet dessert “hello diabetes”. I’ve seen people say a piece of candy is going to give a child diabetes.
A normal human being can consume as much sugar as they want, its not going to give them diabetes or put them into a diabetic coma. Type 1 is congenital, type 2 is caused by things like obesity which are long term lifestyle choices spanning decades.
It is my understanding that some studies have found a link between high sugar consumption and type 2 diabetes, even after they excluded the correlation between high sugar consumption and obesity in general.
I agree that the comments you refer to are misguided and ignorant, but there is in fact a connection.
One big gulp will not send an otherwise healthy person into diabetes. A lifetime…?
My dad has type 2. He’s never been obese - or even overweight - in his life. His father has type 2 - he’s a slim rail of a man. Both are, and have always been, active people who do a lot of walking.
There is some possibility that the people who say “that giant soda is going to put you into a diabetic coma!” or “hello diabetes” are not being serious. They be indicating that they know eating sugar isn’t the best thing for you, and expressing it in a humorous way. Perhaps they are more interested in repressing their own craving for sugar than yours.
As someone proven to have the ability to have Type 2 diabetes (thank you. thank you very much) I was told that a person has to have a predisposition for diabetes for it to come about. Every single thing we eat is ultimately broken down into sugar in order to be assimilated and different foods take longer/shorter amounts of time to do that. Think of each bite as a kind of time-release capsule of nutrient. So sugar gives you a sugar rush, green beans help you maintain. Fortunately I got mine under control with diet and exercise (walking) but some people need pills and some need insulin shots. A woman in my Get A Clue class weighed maybe 100 lbs wet and woke up every morning with a sky-high reading. What got me (but I didn’t say anything, I pick my battles) was when a neighbor was telling me about another neighbor who had it, refused to give in to it, and was just fine. ??? Like will power has anything at all to do with it. Also in the class was a guy who was designated a “brittle copper.” He had exactly four things he could eat without going into shock and possibly dying. Four things. He probably “willed” that to go away, daily. Hope he’s still alive and wasn’t bored to death with his diet.
Ugh, wow, good luck with keeping his sanity with that diet. When I was on a allergy-desensitization diet, I had to go 10 days a month on a ridiculously-strict diet that allowed only rabbit, venison, carrots, tapioca starch and a couple other items (it was a long time ago). It was the most difficult thing in the world to try to stay all ten days on that bland food. By like Day 7 of nothing but the same five things, my body felt like it was literally rejecting it. It took a monumental effort just to choke it down. It felt like eating sawdust. I don’t know how someone does it.
Ambivilid I know, right? I’ve read a lot about Queen Elizibeth 1 and Mary Queen of Scots (anything medaeval and earlier). Liz kept Mary prisoner for years and dutifully had her fed roast and potatoes every day. Every day. For years. Mary wrote in her diary how eating should have been one of the only bright spots in her day but…wasn’t. She could only manage to swallow enough to sustain her. I’d rather take a nutrional pill from the future than to know that, somewhere, somebody was eating bacon. But I wasn’t getting any.
Excessive carbohydrate consumption is indeed what leads to type 2 diabetes. There are other factors, genetic predisposition, etc., but it’s the main cause.
The human metabolic system evolved in an environment where we wouldn’t be able to consume 1/5th of the sugars and simple starches that we eat in our modern diet. As such, there’s a certain level of glycemic response that you’d expect the human metabolic hormones to operate within. But we’re way above that - off the charts. Your pancreas is pumping out insulin like crazy every day to try to keep up with your diet that has a far greater glycemic load than it ever evolved to handle.
After a lifetime of having an overabundance of insulin to control all of this extra glucose, the receptors in cells that detect insulin levels and respond to them become worn out and sensitivity, progressively. This is known as insulin resistance. Eventually you reach the point where your cells are so insensitive to insulin that even with your pancreas secreting the most insulin it can possibly produce it isn’t enough to register the proper response in the cells. This is the point at which you have diabetes.
Saying diabetes comes from being fat is silly - that’s just a correlation. The same thing that leads to diabetes also leads to being fat. But there’s not a causitive relationship there.
I only know his diagnosis - and that he is diet controlled. But despite being thin, he drank a lot of sugared soda and juice and was a big fan of white bread and pasta. He really only needed a diet switch away from soda and to whole grains.
This is not entirely true, IMO. Excess sugar, in the absence of obesity, can lead to fatty liver (hepatic lipogenesis) which can lead to insulin resistance, which can lead to full blown diabetes.
There are plenty of thin, active Type 2s. Hell, I was diagnosed as Type 2 when my BMI was around 23, I was exercising pretty hard 6-8 hours a week, and eating fewer carbs than the diabetes nutritionist recommended for me. As it turned out, I was Type 1, but according to all the diabetes experts I spoke to, it was absolutely not out of the range of possibility that you can be Type 2 and in shape.
Since then, I’ve met several Type 2s that are thin, active, and in shape. Though a lot of Type 2s do suffer from being overweight, not all are. And, for the record, I think it’s a miserable diagnosis - so many can get Type 2 under control with lifestyle changes, the ones who are doing it all right and still can’t control it without drugs and really watching their diet certainly got the short stick.
The one thing that really hit home in all the diabetes education I had (including a week at one of the leading diabetes centers in the country) is that there is no “typical” diabetic. There are trends, but nothing is set in stone. 85-year-olds can be diagnosed with Type 1 (aka Juvenile) diabetes. Thin active people can be Type 2, overweight sedentary people can be Type 1.
That’s really simplifying it.
Someone who doesn’t have those other factors - like genetic predisposition- can eat all the carbs they want and not become diabetic. Likewise, a lot of people with the genetic predisposition can eat the same amount of carbs that someone without the genetic predisposition eats and if they stay active and don’t become excessively overweight, they’ll never develop diabetes.
I don’t think that it’s at all true to say that excessive carb consumption leads to Type 2 diabetes. If all the other factors are there, eating too many carbs will trigger it. But all those other factors are at least as important and MUST be there.
Eating excessive carbs is the single factor that determines whether it will happen or not. If you don’t eat excessive carbs, you won’t develop type 2 diabetes. Genetic predisposition just determines what “excessive” means for you.
Edit: Unless there are forms of type 2 that I’m not aware of, like if some sort of disease could render you insulin resistant.
If your definition of “excessive” includes “the amount of carbs most dietitians agree is necessary for a healthy diet” then you’re right. I, however, don’t define “excessive” as that. You can indeed become diabetic while eating what most people, including dietitians, define as a normal, healthy amount of carbs.
I define excessive as well beyond anything the human body and metabolic regulatory systems saw during their evolution. Agriculture is an evolutionary blip, and “add sugar and HFCS massively to everything” mass production of food is much shorter still.
It’s the constantly maxing out of the insulin regulatory system that eventually leads to its degrading.
I would have to disagree and say that genetic predisposition is the single most important factor in determining whether or not you develop diabetes. Without that, you absolutely will not become diabetic, no matter what you eat.
I’m not up on cutting-edge research, but as of a few years ago, my understanding was that researchers were still trying to figure out exactly what the triggering causes of Type 2 diabetes are. Obesity certainly seems to be a factor. Dietary choices also. But I don’t think you can just say definitively, “It’s caused by carb consumption.” Unless there’s been some new studies out lately that I’m not aware of, which is always a possibility.
Umm… Potatoes weren’t recorded at all in England until 1585, at which point they were regarded as odd and possibly poisonous; they were only grown- as a new, fashionable crop- from 1597.