Increasing obesity pushes diabetes drug bill to £600m

[Useless Pretty Boy]

And what about the people who smoke their entire lives and don't get lung cancer? Or the alcoholics who never develop liver disease?

Does that mean smoking doesn't cause lung cancer and heavy drinking doesn't wreck livers?

No. It does not.

 

[hanadr]

UPB
I have spent half my life trying to get my weight down. I eat sparingly and low carb, I exercise in classes several times a week, I hike. I use my feet as my main means of travel. If you have the simple answer to why my weight is static,( you seem to have simple answers) Please let me know. Don't give me the "calories in" and "calories out" guff. It's not working.
Hana

 

[Spiral]

I'd like to ask why type 2's are being prescribed insulin in the first place. Whatever happened to diet control? And no, I'm not advocating the extreme ow carb diet, just eating healthily... as if it were difficult. Sigh.

This kind of smug **** shows no understanding of T2 diabetes.

My weight is a symptom of diabetes not the cause. I have genes which are better suited to a feast/famine lifestyle. This might have been a huge evolutionary advantage in times past, but unfortunately, late 20th early 21st century life is a permanent feast and my T2 body is very efficient at laying the excess down as fat.

The fat adds to insulin resistance, which means that my body does not use the insulin it does produce properly. T2s ironically start off by overproducing insulin. Those large quantities of insulin mean that all that circulating glucose (from a diet high in carbohydrate) gets laid down as fat.

Carbs are also very addictive and those extreme blood sugar swings feed carb crafings. I was permanently hungry when I was eating the Healthy Plate, always on the lookout for my next mouthful, in spite of having eaten a meal high on starchy carb which was supposed to fill me up. It is only since I stopped eating them that I have been able to identify the difference between carb cravings and real hunger.

Those toxically high sugar levels continue to damage virtually every system in the body, including the beta cells in the pancreas which produce the insulin in the first place, eventually killing them off. So diabetics who are prescribed insulin usually have very poor insulin production, I'd have thought you knew that UPB.

Yeah, but there simply isn't any way for me to feel sorry for anyone who has eaten themselves into diabetes. I'm sure a lot of people with T2 would rather look at their weight as a symptom than a cause, because then it isn't their fault.

Simply not being able to stop eating isn't a medical condition, no more than feeling sad every now and then is. But instead of just living with the sadness every now and then, we're becoming a country of pill poppers. And instead of simply not gorging, we start prescribing expensive insulin instead. I'm a type 1. I'll die within a month if unable to inject insulin. Slowly and painfully. Type 2's won't. So I just can't bring myself to feel any sort of sympathy. I'd give anything to be type 2 instead of type 1, but instead I'm stuck with my needles (and I'd like to point out I've had to get past my needle phobia in order to inject) while type 2's blame their genetics for not being able to stop eating.

That just doesn't wash with me.

UPB, you have already made up your mind, why let research and scientific fact get in the way of your prejudices about T2 diabetics? Your attitude is insulting and downright offensive.

 

[Romola]

Would just like to say that as a diet and exercise only T2, I don't find these comments offensive at all. Would I swap my situation with UPB's? Of course not.

Becoming overweight/obese is bad for many aspects of our health.

It may be that T2s have a greater tendancy to gain weight - but the fact remains that we are all in charge of what we put into our mouths. Nobody suddenly becomes obese, and a set of ordinary scales are not expensive.

It is within everyone's ability to moniter their weight and adjust what they eat before it becomes a serious problem. Getting into the obese range is down to the person - they are not enslaved by their genes, even if they do make weight control more difficult for them.

 

[Celtic.Piskie]

but the fact remains that we are all in charge of what we put into our mouths. Nobody suddenly becomes obese, and a set of ordinary scales are not expensive.

Sense.

Yes loosing weight is harder for some people than it is others.
But eating 5,000 calories a day and never moving from the sofa is not going to make you healthy.
It is going to make you put on weight.

The amount of people who are seriously, morbidly obese in this country...
Always down to a 'condition' or 'genetics'.
There would be a lot less if more people ate healthily and exercised more.

 

[Patch]

What does healthily mean? This is the whole point. Is the advise we've been taking for decades helping us, or hindering us? What if it's the food that we're eating that causes the problem? (I used to practically live off pasta and wholemeal bread, because we were told that it was "healthy", and could only lose (tiny amounts) of weight eating this food if I ate pitifully small portions).

It's getting to a point where I wish I didn't have to eat at all.

 

[Katharine]

I added a comment to the timesonline article. I have said that the Governments healthy eating advice is a major contributory factor to the problem.

The rise in obesity and diabetes is multifactorial. We are eating much more calories from omega six oils and refined carbohydrate than we were in the 1970s. Most of this gain is thought to be from fast food. Just about everything else is the same. We eat about the same amount of meat overall but less beef and more chicken. We eat about the same amount of fruit and vegetables. We drink less milk but eat more cheese. We do much less physical activity. Central heating is now commonplace. Those who are working have less leisure time. We spend more time at computers and watching television.

It is certainly easier to put weight on than lose it in our obesogenic environment.

I was reading Bryon Richard's Mastering Leptin. He explains that overweight people have a disordered hormonal environment. They have less Grehlin in the stomach before eating than thin people but that once they start eating it takes much longer for the Grehlin to come back down to normal. They get the urge to eat earlier than thin people and their brain doesn't get the message that the stomach is full till a lot later than thin people. The reason why they eat is because they are hungry. As we all know, it is terribly difficult to ignore food if you are hungry.

 

[Soundgen]

Even so, it is likely that you've been told that you caused your diabetes by letting yourself get fat and that this toxic myth is damaging your health.

Blaming you for your condition causes guilt and hopelessness. Even worse, the belief that people with diabetes have brought their disease on themselves inclines doctors to assume that since you did nothing to prevent your disease, you won't make the effort to control it--a belief that may lead to your getting extremely poor care.

The myth that diabetes is caused by overeating also hurts the one out of five people who are not overweight when they contract Type 2 Diabetes. Because doctors only think "Diabetes" when they see a patient who fits the stereotype--the grossly obese inactive patient--they often neglect to check people of normal weight for blood sugar disorders even when they show up with classic symptoms of high blood sugar such as recurrent urinary tract infections or neuropathy.

http://www.phlaunt.com/diabetes/14046739.php

I am not overweight and my neuropathy wasn't even linked to diabetes by my GP when I was diagnosed with diabetes . if Type 2 was caused by being overweight there wouldn't be any normal weight Type 2s .

There also seems to be some sort of link betweeen Type 2 and PCBs ( apparently fat people without Type 2 havd no or little PCB's in their bodies ) see http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diabetes-diabetesrisk-heart-disease-obesity-pcbs.html and http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2008/2008-01-25-04.asp

 

[Soundgen]

More links to PCBs suggest that they reduce levels of adiponectin http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v32/n12/abs/ijo2008169a.html

Adiponectin is a protein hormone that modulates a number of metabolic processes, including glucose regulation and fatty acid catabolism.[3] Adiponectin is exclusively secreted from adipose tissue into the bloodstream and is very abundant in plasma relative to many hormones. Levels of the hormone are inversely correlated with body fat percentage in adults,[4] while the association in infants and young children is more unclear. The hormone plays a role in the suppression of the metabolic derangements that may result in type 2 diabetes,[4] obesity, atherosclerosis,[3] non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and an independent risk factor for metabolic syndrome.[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiponectin