An Approaching Epidemic?

In my naturopathy and clinical biochemistry classes I have been exposed to the idea of diabetes a little too much. Well what is diabetes? It's a Greek word meaning that you pee too much due to either of two causes. The first is diabetes insipidus where you pituitary does not produce enough antidiuretic hormone (aka vasopressin) so your kidneys are not capable of retaining water. The second type is diabetes mellitus where there're high levels of sugar in the blood and consequently in the urine. The sugar in the urine prevents the kidney from conserving the water. Now diabetes mellitus in itself is comprised of type I and type II diabetes which has to do with insulin.

Ok so insulin is a hormone which is made in the pancreas and is released after you eat. It basically tells your body cells "Yo, there's food out there! Open the door and Bring in the Sugar!" The cells then happily oblige and take the sugar from the blood and use it or store it. Note: not every cell requires insulin to take up sugar these specifically being the brain, neurons, blood cells (both red and white), eyes, kidney, and muscle during exercise. Unfortunately, these are the organs/ cells that get damaged the most when sugar concentrations are high :(


Alrighties, so type I diabetes is very unfortunate because it is an autoimmune disease. Your body (the antibodies) attack and destroy the parts of the pancreas that produce insulin. Therefore, you have no insulin at all and your body literally starves. The affected individuals are usually really young and experience polyuria (a lot of peeing), polydypsia (excessive thirst) and polyphagia (excessive eating while losing or maintaining weight). Basically, there is a lot of sugar in your blood but the cells can't take it up and use it. So you start burning fat and protein... and you slowly eat your body away... It's like your cells are in a prison with loads of food right in front of them but they can't reach it and have it enter into their prison cell. It is a very severe disease and before most individuals with type I diabetes would die way before puberty. Fortunately, technology enabled us to make synthetic insulin and inject it into the patients. In this way they can control their blood sugar and live a relatively normal life.

Type II Diabetes Mellitus (I will refer to it as T2DM) is when your body becomes desensitized to insulin and does not respond to it. Of course there is a genetic component to this disease so by no way everyone who has T2DM caused it upon themselves but PREDOMINANTLY this is a life style based disease. I will not go into the actual molecular mechanism but it has to do with obesity, high sugar consumption, and lack of exercise. Overall T2DM is a growing epidemic. Literally... The prevalence is enormal and is growing out of control. I've stared at this graph for a long time after class... The values are the prevalence (sort of like a %) of T2DM in 2000 and the predicted value in 2030. The percentage value shows the percentage increase in T2DM prevalence. SCARY!!!

Source: http://www.bostonscientific-international.com/templatedata/imports/HTML/intl/WorldDiabetesDay/worlddiabetesday_prevalence_intl.html

So what's the big problem with having high blood sugar levels? Well technically people don't die from diabetes but they die from diabetes related complications. Remember how I mentioned that there're some cells that don't need insulin to take up cells? Well they are the ones that suffer... The sugars can react with proteins to "glycosylate" them meaning that the sugar attaches to the protein which changes some of its properties. That's where the HbA1c comes from, it's the measure of how much of the hemoglobin protein in your blood has been glycosylated. 

Your eyes begin to suffer as the proteins get glycosylated causing diabetic retinopathy. Nerves begin to function poorly leading to diabetic neuropathy. This means both that your ability to feel decreases and it is harder to use your muscles, eventually leading to muscle atrophy. The worst however is diabetic nephropathy where your kidney get damaged. Then they fail and you need a transplant, but honestly they don't really give kidneys to diabetics as the new kidney will get damaged as well. Due to inability to control the amount of water in your blood, problems with blood pressure arise (not to mention all of the ion imbalances and mineral deficiencies). This is quite serious as diabetics with nephropathy have a 10 time greater risk of suffering cardiac problems such as heart attack... Therefore cardiac arrest is generally the main cause of death in T2DM patients.

How do you treat T2DM? Of course there's metformin... However, the best treatment are your lovely muscles. Remember how I said that muscles don't need insulin to take in sugar? Exactly, even something as simple as a walk will decrease the blood sugar levels much more than metformin or other ever will. So yea... the best treatment is diet and exercise. Sounds simple ha? So why is this a growing epidemic?

Now why did I even bother talking about diabetes? Personally I don't have a single risk factor so it's not something I need to worry about. However, there's my dad... I'm not sure what his weight is but he's definitely at least overweight if not already stage I obese. We had a lot of cakes/ sweets left over from the easter dinner and watching as my dad literally STUFFED himself with these sweets made me want to cry :( The thing is, he eats a lot of sweets EVERY DAY neither does he ever exercise. I really don't know what to do about it... I've talked to him about, gosh my whole family talked to him... but he just won't listen. Now that I'm moving back home this is something that I really need to take into my hands. Any ideas on how to talk some sense into my dad? Should I just try making "healthy" versions of deserts for him as alternatives if he doesn't listen?