Prevalence Of Diabetes Getting Freakin’ Nuts
The CDC released a report recently concerning the prevalence of diabetes in this country, and it basically made me flip my lid. I mean, I knew it was bad, but this is freakin’ NUTS.
Little side note: I decided I had to write a full article on this, because I was in the middle of writing an article on garlic and heart health, and diabetes came up, and I started flying into a written rant about how bad diabetes is (it makes sense if you read the article), that my heart health post started turning into a diabetes post. So, short story long, I decided to cut most of that info out of the garlic article and make a seperate post about the absolutely insane breakaway pace that type 2 diabetes is taking over this country.
Anywho, the CDC reports that currently, the prevalence of diabetes in Amercia is one in ten. ONE IN TEN. Among older individuals, it’s as bad as one in four. And it’s only going to get worse.
We Americans are busily eating our way into a diabetic nightmare. If our current trends (meaning, eating sugary processed food with both hands and some sort of trowel or other small shovel-like instrument) continue, we’re well on the road to one in five or even ONE IN THREE Americans having type 2 diabetes within thirty or forty years.
HOLY. CRAP.
Folks, it’s really, really tough to describe just how bad this situation is without using profanity, or fire, or setting something on fire while screaming profanity, or some other shrieking, fiery, uncontrollable fit of rage and despair.
Okay, let’s take this one step at a time. First, I’ll talk a little bit about the history of type 2 diabetes, then we’ll talk about what the disease actually is, what causes it, and why it really, really sucks to have it.
The History Of Type 2 Diabetes
Let’s get a little historical perspective on this. Diabetes has been recognized for a LONG time, but has been considered a very unusual and uncommon condition for, well, pretty much thousands of years. Essentially, until the modern era.
Hippocrates, the great Greek physician who lived circa 400 BC, identified it but called it “rare”. Galen (circa 200 AD), the big heavy-hitter physician of the Roman era, only saw TWO cases in his entire career. For those of you who have never heard of Galen, picture a real-life “House, MD” who was living in the Roman Empire. He ended up as the personal physician to several emperors, and his theories and writing influenced Western medicine for over a thousand years after his death… and he only ever saw TWO cases of diabetes.
Other documents from Arabic and Ayurvedic sources mention the disease, but again, the condition was so rare that it was poorly understood and treatments for it seemed random and ineffective.
Jumping forward to 1825, a physician named Pratt writing a dissertation on diabetes called it a “rare occurence”. And finally, in 1958, the prevalence of diabetes was reported as 1 in 100 (M Engelgau et al. Ann Intern Med. 2004;140:945-950), which was probably a dramatic increase from 100 years earlier.
Fifty years later, we’ve gone from 1 in 100, to 10 in 100… and rising.
Type 1 Versus Type 2 Diabetes
So just what the heck is diabetes, and what’s the big deal about it? Simply put, diabetes is too much sugar in the blood. This happens for one of two reasons: either the body isn’t making enough insulin (insulin removes sugar from the blood), or the body is making insulin, but the insulin isn’t working. There’s also gestational diabetes (caused by pregnancy) but I don’t want to confuse things here so let’s just stick with Type 1 and Type 2.
Type 1 is the not-making-insulin kind. It’s also called “juvenile onset diabetes”, although it can come on in adulthood. The body doesn’t make enough insulin because the organ that makes insulin, the pancreas, is being progressively broken down by the body’s own immune system (an “autoimmune” disorder). It seems to be caused by a genetic predisposition that gets triggered by an environmental event (nobody’s really sure what that is).
Type 2 is the I’ve-got-insulin-but-it-ain’t-workin’ kind. It usually starts out as a pre-diabetic state called insulin resistance, which is what it sounds like.
Insulin basically signals the cells of the body to open up and let sugar go from the bloodstream into the actual cell itself. Each cell has a wall that acts, well, like a wall… keeps the inside stuff in and the outside stuff out. But just like you need to take stuff into your house (like groceries) and out of your house (like the garbage), your cell needs to exchange stuff with its environment.
So, the cell has little doorways all over its surface, on the wall, and certain chemicals signal the cell to open up the door and let something in. Sort of like ringing the doorbell (well, it’s actually more like a secret knock, but that’s not important to this discussion).
Anyway, insulin rings the doorbell to tell the cell to open up and let sugar in. When you’ve got insulin resistance, it’s kind of like a pain in the ass little kid in the neighborhood has been just RINGING, and RINGING, and RINGING your doorbell, and you get to the point of loathing where you just don’t answer the door anymore. In other words, the signal is being sent, it’s just not being answered.
Why so your cells start to ignore the signal? Again, think of that pain in the ass kid who over-rings the doorbell. In the modern era, we don’t eat just a little bit of sugar, we eat HOLY COW BAM KAPOW DROP A BOMB OF SUGAAAAAAR! We FLOOD our body with the stuff, far more than the human body has evolved to handle over the millions of years we’ve developed as a species.
Think about it. How much sugar do you think a caveman ate, say, 15,000 years ago? In evolutionary terms, 15,000 years is very recent. Homo sapiens sapiens is around 150,000 years old as a distinct species, and our primate evolutionary predecestors can be tracked back over 50 million years.
Do you like they had a lot of Frosted Flakes back then? High-fructose corn syrup? Ben and Jerry’s ice cream?
Not so much. Mostly, it was a lot of meat and nuts and vegetables and fruit. There’s sugar in fruit, of course, but also a lot of fiber that tampers how quickly it enters the bloodstream. It’s only after we started refining foods that we essentially started main-lining sugar… and, as a consequence, overloaded over bodys’ cells with annoying ringing doorbells that they eventually stopped answering (which we now call Type 2 diabetes).
If the cells don’t take the sugar out of the blood… it stays there. Hence, high blood sugar.
Effects Of Diabetes
Okay, you say, but so what? So I’ve got tons of sugar in my blood, doesn’t that just make me a sweet, sweet person?
Mmmmm no. Diabetes actually wrecks absolute havoc on the body. It significantly increases the risk of cardiovascular disease (discussed in this post on garlic and hearth health) and related death.
Oh, but there’s more. How about diabetic retinopathy, which is going blind due to the death of the small arteries of the eye? Or diabetic gangrene, which is the formation of ulcers that don’t want to heal or other pieces of the body simply dying and rotting away. There’s also diabetic neuropathy, which is losing sensation and other neural function in various areas of the body (especially the feet).
Remember, your nerves and blood vessels branch out into tinier and tinier versions to reach out into every bit of you. Diabetes kills those smaller branches off, more and more, until things start going numb and just plain dying.
Those are just the obvious things that we can definitely blame on diabetes. But think about it. If the condition is killing off the smallest branches of nerves and blood vessels, damage like that is going on all over the body.
Imagine if tomorrow, every driveway in America disappeared. Now every little alleyway and side street. Even though the major highways and throughfares are intact, how is the average family going to get stuff delivered to their house? Get groceries there? Take the trash out?
They can’t. And so, they’ll starve to death in a pile of garbage. Nice, hunh? The same thing happens in the bodies of diabetics, causing God only knows what kind of damage throughout the body.
The bottom line is, diabetes IS a big deal and you don’t want it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, sugar is tasty, slow poison and should be treated as such. If Americans insist on gobbling that poison down in ever-increasing bucketloads, you can expect the CDC’s dire predictions about the prevalence of diabetes to come true.
Stay healthy!
Source article on CDC’s announcement: http://www.usmedicine.com/news/2010/10/26/cdc-projects-potential-for-sharp-rise-in-diabetes-prevalence.html