Have we overtime created diabetics?

[frankie7488]

Things have changed. Especially in how we perceive and teach to our children about what's good for them to eat and not. In the modern world that we live in, I have witnessed a mother giving her newborn baby a bottle of coke to drink instead of milk. I am not saying this is the exact reason for the creation of diabetics, but overtime we have gathered habits of choosing sugar over fruit. Have we overtime lowered our body chances of creating enough insulin etc????
NO medical background, just wondering if we are a environmental factor ???

 

[JohnEGreen]

Diabetes is not a modern "creation" it;s been around since ancient times I do not think they gave their children Coke in ancient Egypt so I think the answer to your question is no.

 

[hankjam]

No
There's always change.

 

[Deleted Account]

I believe there is an increase in both type 1 and type 2 diabetes which some have suggested implies there may be an environmental factor to both types. However, I don't think anyone has been able to scientifically confirm what this factor is.
Sure, diabetes has been around a long time so it is not caused by a recent environmental changed. But there may be some recent change which is making it more common.

As scary as the thought of feeding a baby cola is, it is likely to lead to rotten teeth before diabetes.

 

[lucylocket61]

I do not think we are creating Diabetics. Not everyone who has a lot of sugar and/or is overweight becomes diabetic. It seems like the increased in sugar, especially hidden sugars and fruit juices, may be triggering some people who might not have progressed to diabetes if food processing had not messed with us.

I am talking about type 2 as i dont know much about any other sort.

 

[Guzzler]

Things have changed. Especially in how we perceive and teach to our children about what's good for them to eat and not. In the modern world that we live in, I have witnessed a mother giving her newborn baby a bottle of coke to drink instead of milk. I am not saying this is the exact reason for the creation of diabetics, but overtime we have gathered habits of choosing sugar over fruit. Have we overtime lowered our body chances of creating enough insulin etc????
NO medical background, just wondering if we are a environmental factor ???

I am interested in knowing what You think. Do you think we did this to ourselves and our families?

 

[Chook]

I believe some of the population is genetically pre-disposed to developing T2 and only get it if their environment provides them with the correct set of circumstances which are either plenty of readily available carb-rich food plus or insufficient exercise - or both.

While I wouldn't recommend feeding a new born with coke it is unlikely to make that child develop diabetes unless he/she has got a set of genes that would allow him/her to develop it.

The other thing, of course, is that the medical profession is much better at diagnosing it nowadays and people are more likely to visit the doctor when they feel ill but in the past there may well have been plenty of people develop it but who couldn't afford to go to the doctor in the pre NHS days. My Mother came from a very large very poor family in London and none of them ever visited the doctor in childhood. In adulthood they carried on with the idea of 'not bothering the doctor' and most of my mother's and her father died in their 30s and 40s. On talking to one of my cousins it seems likely that her father and my grand father (and possibly more of them) had symptoms of uncontrolled T2 but we'll never know for sure.

 

[spaceman]

Things have changed. Especially in how we perceive and teach to our children about what's good for them to eat and not. In the modern world that we live in, I have witnessed a mother giving her newborn baby a bottle of coke to drink instead of milk. I am not saying this is the exact reason for the creation of diabetics, but overtime we have gathered habits of choosing sugar over fruit. Have we overtime lowered our body chances of creating enough insulin etc????
NO medical background, just wondering if we are a environmental factor ???

2 children I know aged under 5 years old one went to get 5 teeth out the other 7 teeth out last week due to excess sugar

 

[Squire Fulwood]

Another bloody stupid poll where the only possible answers don't match most of the population. I am 74, what have children got to do with it.

 

[donnellysdogs]

I cannot see why T1s are increasing to be honest unless something is causing genes or factors to change... or is it just the population increasing? Has the percentage of T1's compared to population increased or is it that deaths from diabetes werent always registered correctly because of other complications in centuries past?

Personally I do not like all the additional vaccines, antibiotics, meds, foods, pesticides etc in the whole world. I think the increases in all diseases (pretty much) shows factors of the human race killing itself let alone just diabetes.

Just with medicines, so many side effects are listed.. help one disease-but create other probs??

I just think the current population are just guinea pigs... for everything..

 

[Grateful]

I am going to present a different "take." It is something I firmly believe, but it is just that, an unverifiable "belief."

This mainly pertains to Type 2.

I believe that when we abandoned hunter-gathering and became settled farmers, we invented "processed foods."

• Domesticating cattle and drinking what comes from their udders.
• Cultivating grain, grinding it, and making bread or pasta from the flour.
• Much later, importing a strange tuber from the New World, the potato.
• Cultivating rice in flooded paddies.

I could go on for a long time. The key thing here is that these things took a lot of human ingenuity, and a lot of time (often at least an entire year of cultivation, even longer to bring up a cow). So it is quite recent, only the past 10,000 years or so.

But modern homo sapiens evolved slowly. Ten thousand years is the blink of an eyelid in terms of how much adaptation you can expect the body to make.

In the pre-agricultural age our diet was naturally low-carb, with some exceptions. Fruit, for example. But even that was probably quite a rare treat, except in some parts of the world where wild fruits are really abundant.

So my notion is that the human pancreas just wasn't suited for the carb load it began to bear about 10,000 years ago -- and the body as a whole, which would explain "insulin resistance." This explains why diabetes is such an ancient disease. It also explains why a handful of humans who have low-carb traditions (Inuit, Masai) apparently have very low Type 2 diabetes rates.

 

[ickihun]

I believe that because I had insulin resistance at 5yrs old or earlier milk was my main stable diet then banana, carrot etc.
Because I was premature my gut was premature so food became digested incorrectly and put pressure on my liver which was formed from an alcoholic and a tea total. The liver is the backbone of type2 not the pancreas. My belief. For me. If I had a new liver and correctly formed gut I may get cured of IR which may cure type2 diabetes. I was put under alot of stress as a young child then reaching more than 16stones at 14yrs old my liver was dumping to keep up with my carb cravings. Until I did milkshake diet and lost 7st. Which took 7yrs to put back on.
When im stressed I balloon. Always have.

 

[chalup]

I think maybe, and it's just an opinion, that T1 is increasing because people who develop it are living to have their own children. The genes may not express in every generation but before insulin therapy a large percentage of T1's died before ever having families. I do not think it is the whole story by a long shot but it may be a factor.

 

[Robinredbreast]

@chalup has given a very useful and informative post
Also, I know of a mother ( a PE teacher and a good Judo player since her teens) who has 4 children, 3 boys and 1 girl, 3 of the children have developed type 1 diabetes
We also know that children are now being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, which was virtually unheard of years ago.

 

[Robinredbreast]

Things have changed. Especially in how we perceive and teach to our children about what's good for them to eat and not. In the modern world that we live in, I have witnessed a mother giving her newborn baby a bottle of coke to drink instead of milk. I am not saying this is the exact reason for the creation of diabetics, but overtime we have gathered habits of choosing sugar over fruit. Have we overtime lowered our body chances of creating enough insulin etc????
NO medical background, just wondering if we are a environmental factor ???

I don't know how a newborn baby could tolerate the excess gases from sucking on coke ( cocoa cola) also, it's shocking child abuse and should be reported.

 

[Squire Fulwood]

I don't know how a newborn baby could tolerate the excess gases from sucking on coke ( cocoa cola) also, it's shocking child abuse and should be reported.

I suppose this is relevant. Prof. Lustig says he is getting 6 month old babies in his clinic who are obese. He says it is largely due to the parents dipping the baby's pacifier in syrup to keep the child quiet. I think the coke would be worse and he has spoken of it but not in regard to infants.

 

[Grateful]

Another issue is increasing life expectancy.

Type 2 diabetes, like many forms of cancer, is to some extent a disease of middle-age and old-age. There are of course plenty of people with diabetes who are younger, but in T2 there is still a bias toward later in life.

When life expectancy was shorter, something else would kill us before we even developed the disease.

 

[kokhongw]

Have we overtime lowered our body chances of creating enough insulin etc????

No...we have promoted a lifestyle that chronically requires excessive insulin. Hence up to 75% of the population may have this problem of excessive insulin response.