I have tried to find this answer out for myself and even doctors give me unclear answers. Is Diabites caused by too much sugar? (daily Pepsi, etc) If not, then what exactly causes it?
I’ve read it isn’t. It can be caused by obesity, which sugar contributes to, but that probably doesn’t count in the spirit of your question.
Type II diabetes (insulin resistance) is strongly correlated with obesity, and of course too much sugar can make you fat. I don’t think there’s a direct correlation between sugar consumption and diabetes, though.
Healthy and fit people can develop Type II diabetes as well, but the obese are at greater risk.
If only it was that simple… It is known what diabetes is and it is known that you can be genetically predisposed (having a greater chance of getting it than the general population) and it is known that obesity greatly increases your risk, but as to exactly why some people get it and some don’t… well, the functioning of the human body is still in large part a mystery wrapped in an enigma and this is one the questions yet to be answered.
My mother and father and my sister all have/had TypeII diabetes and I used to be very overweight and yet I never developed the disease and while I have since dropped the excess weight, my doctor still considers me “at risk” because of my family history and has me get a blood and urine test every year. Such is life.
Even people who never eat much sugar can get diabetes, if (for example) they eat tons of fatty foods and never exercise, causing them to get obese, which makes them much more likely to get Type II diabetes. Broadly speaking, that’s when the body stops ‘listening’ to insulin, meaning that even though they make plenty of it, their cells don’t respond to insulin signaling by taking up and processing sugars from the blood, like a non-diabetic person’s cells would. Nobody really knows why this happens, although there are many things that are known to make it more likely to happen, particularly obesity.
Type I diabetes, the kind that usually sets in during childhood, is much rarer, and is an autoimmune disorder unrelated to diet or obesity level. For unknown reasons, their bodies destroy their insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, so their body can’t make insulin; they need to inject the stuff several times a day to live.
Diabites: The New Diet Food for Scientologists
No!!
Sorry, I didn’t mean to yell, and I certainly don’t think poorly of you for asking. It is, after all, an oft asked question but, alas, oft incorrectly answered.
While, of course, it is the case that diabetes is characterized by high levels of sugar in the blood, that is simply a consequence of the diabetes, not a cause. At the end of the day, pretty well ALL forms of diabetes are caused by lack of insulin - even type II diabetes.
Basically, through a combination of genetics and lifestyle (obesity & inactivity), people often become insulin resistant. Simply put, their body no longer responds well to the effect of insulin. One KEY point which seems to always be omitted from this type of discussion is that the insulin resistance affects the muscles of the body more than other parts. Indeed, if there was equal resistance to insulin in fat tissue to that in the muscles, then how could obese diabetics continue to build up their fat and get even fatter?
Since the muscles are the big users of sugar in the body, and since that’s where insulin resistance is the greatest, the net effect is that sugar in the bloodstream has trouble getting into the muscles. Hence, its level tends to rise and high blood sugar results. However, so long as the pancreas is healthy, it can make sufficient insulin to overcome the resistance and thereby lower the blood sugar back towards normal (while building up fat, mind you!)
Eventually, presumably as a result of the ongoing high demand placed on it to make insulin to overcome the resistance, the pancreas poops out. Nobody really understands what “pooping out” actually means. It could be that every time an insulin molecule is released a toxic byproduct is released. That would mean that the more insulin you make, the more chance there is of (ultimately) “poisoning” your pancreas. Another theory has to do with inflammation affecting the insulin producing cells. Or, it may simply be genetics - some pancreases have more “reserve” than others.
Once the pancreas can’t make enough insulin to overcome the insulin resistance, high blood sugar ensues. That’s usually the point where we’d say someone has become diabetic (as opposed to “pre-diabetic”).
Let me add one important notion for those interested and who know just a bit about metabolism:
The fatter somebody is, the more fat they have (duh). But, digging deeper, and recognizing that fat = triglycerides, and triglycerides = free fatty acids and glycerol, you see that being fat means havings higher levels of FFAs. If I told you that FFAs cause muscle to “ignore” glucose and use FFAs instead (for their energy source), and if I told you that FFAs signal the liver to make glucose (obviously with both these effects tending to elevate blood glucose), I think you’ll agree that there may well be a causal role for abonormal fat metabolism (i.e. high levels of FFAs) in the pathogenesis of type II diabetes.
(btw, did you notice that I cited no role for “too much sugar” as causing diabetes)
KarlGauss, I’m saving that post of yours to help edumacate my patients and colleagues! Way to go!
I posted this question because I consume sugar but am quite slim. I did not want to end up with this diease and I don’t want anyone I love to. In the course of my work, I see people who have to go through dialyisis (sp). They are among the most depressed people I have ever encountered.
Uh… dialisis is for renal failure. Which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with diabetes.
Having sugar right before the analysis can give a false positive (you just ate sugar, so your blood sugar levels are high - that’s actually normal and healthy); the blood analysis is done on an empty stomach because if you have a lot of sugar in your blood at a time when a healthy body would have had time to store it away, you’re having “problems storing sugar away” (i.e., diabetes).
But “having sugar in my blood because I just ate” is not the same as having diabetes.
Over half my dialysis patients (I’ve got about 12 of them right now) are on dialysis due to diabetes-related kidney failure.
Also, on a slightly tangential note, sugar (meaning table sugar, i.e. sucrose) is not particularly dangerous for diabetics. I remember always hearing ‘oh he can’t eat syrup with his pancakes because he’s diabetic’ and things like that when I was a kid, and still sometimes today. Fact is, starch is significantly worse for what it does to blood sugar. This is because sucrose is a dimer of glucose and fructose, and the fructose needs to get converted to glucose before your body can use it, so the overall glucose surge is not so bad. Starch on the other hand is a dimer of 2 glucose molecules, and your body rapidly breaks the dimer down to monomers (starts happening in your mouth, actually, through salivary amylases), so you get a lot more of a glucose surge per gram of starch.
So if you the diabetic are sitting there contemplating your choices at IHOP, it’s the pancakes that should worry you, not the syrup. Same goes for white bread, white pasta, potatoes…all more dangerous than sugar.
Is the limiations of your pancreas related to time? I’m not sure how to ask this but I will try to stumble my way through.
So what I gather is Diabetes is when your cells no longer have the insulin needed to get the glucose to function properly, right? But there is different stages of diabetes, surely it isn’t “you have the worst diabetes, or you have no diabetes.” If so some glucose is managing to get into the cell, as the cells aren’t dying off totally (that happens in the extremeties in severe cases, but you would die of gangrene or something before every cell in your body dies in that manner).
So some is getting through, and my understanding is how much gets through depends on how much is “in the blood” at the time, hence the blood sugar levels. So if you eat something that produces lower blood sugar for a longer period of time, rather than one huge dump of sugar (sucrose, say), your cells have a greater chance of getting the glucose through its walls.
So in the case of somebody geneticially inclined to diabetes, eating lots of sugar (high GI foods) is just as likely to cause diabetes as somebody that shares the dispostion, but is obese and eats fatty foods with low sugar. Right? If not, why?
Both the pancakes and the syrup should be a concern for diabetics. This morning I had whole grain buckwheat pancakes with sugar free maple syrup, Canadian bacon and some blueberries. Tastey and good for me . 
When you are pre-diabetic it’s important to make healthy decisions about your choices all of your foods, not mixing good and bad ones thinking that they will offset each other.
Epimetheus, eating sugar aggravates diabetes by placing more sugar into your bloodstream that needs to be processed by your bodies limited supply of insulin (via an overworked pancreas), but does not cause the disease.
Thank you, FutureEMT1, and all the responders. I just had a fasting blood sugar analysis last week that showed my glucose level at 110. And I have a sweet-tooth. Naturally, I pondered the connection. Thank you for the answers!
Well, not all kinds.
Course, you knew that. Just pickin’.
Sorry to be such a pain, just trying to fully comprehend this, but if the bodies cells build up resistance throughout life, and placing more sugar into the bloodstream aggrevates this condition of resistance more than the same amount of sugar over a long period of time, then couldn’t you say that eating things with lots of sugar aggrevates this condition and can lead to the end result of diabetes much faster?
So while sugar doesn’t “cause” diabetes, does it not make it come about much quicker, if one is predisposed? Is saying “sugar doesn’t ‘cause’ diabetes” a matter of semantics?
The extra sugar in your bloodstream cause problems other than diabetes. It can cause nerve damage, kidney failure, glaucoma and lead to increased risk for coronary heart disease. My dad’s cause of death was listed as a heart failure, even though it was brought on by years of battling diabetes.
Could “high blood sugar” be considered the disease and all the other conditions symptoms of the problem?
I’ve personally seen diabetics I’ve known use both arguments (not the same person) to justify what they eat. One would drink soda all the time saying “Sugar doesn’t cause diabetes, nor make it worse” and the other constantly drank water or diet soda, but ate Lasagna, Pizza, french fries, etc and lots of them, saying “as long as I don’t eat sugar, I’ll be ok.”
To me, saying “Sugar doesn’t cause” diabetes only causes more problems, as cutting down sugar intake (and not increasing fat), can drastically cut down your chances of developing full blown diabetes. Saying “sugar can exacerbate conditions that may lead you to develop diabetes faster, and so can eating too much food in general, so watch what you eat” is better, but while “sugar causes diabetes” isn’t fully ‘correct,’ isn’t it close enough?
I just re-read the whole thread twice and I think I get it (thanks KarlGuass).
Confusing stuff, as we are constantly told in Health and in the Media, that eating loads of sugar will make you diabetic because it makes your cells resistant.
So if you have two equally disposed persons eating way too much food, one eats fats and the other eats sugars, would they get diabetes at the time? In other words, just to clarify, Sugar could possibly lead to incidence of diabetes (excess converted to fat, etc), but no more than eating lots of fat itself, right? So the key to avoiding diabetes is just watching how much you eat, not what?