TYPE 2 AND HEALTHY LIFESTYLE

�by Peter J. Nebergall, PhD

Strictly speaking, we don't know what causes diabetes.

We know about 10% will have type 1, with its sudden,

unambiguous symptoms and immediate need for injected

insulin; but about 90% of all diabetics have type 2, with

its slow, creeping onset, and increasing need for first oral

medications, then insulin.� How'd they get it?� Where did

they get it from?

We know genetics plays a role in type 2, as it clearly

runs in families.� We know lifestyle plays a role, and we

know there's something about weight.� Let's see how they fit

together.� Keep in mind that although we can see the genetic

link, no researcher has yet isolated which gene is

responsible for type 2 diabetes.

Now things get a bit complex.� Geneticists know there

is a difference between carrying a trait (like having the

gene for type 2 diabetes) and expressing that trait (having

overt type 2 diabetes).� In so many words, having the gene

is not the same thing as having the disease.� People can

have the trait, and not show the overt symptoms of diabetes.

How?

Type 2 is also known as adult-onset diabetes.� In past

centuries, a good many people didn't live long enough for

the diabetes they were doubtless carrying to express, to

give them the diagnosable symptoms of type 2 diabetes.� They

died of childhood diseases, accidents, plague, war, or

filth-borne killers like typhus and cholera instead.� Now we

live longer, and type 2 appears.

In the past, most peoples jobs involved hard physical

labor.� There was no shortage of exercise, and few but kings

had the opportunity to get fat and be sedentary.� Now, far

too many of us sit down to work, and eat junk food.� Diet

and exercise?� Type 2 appears.

Here's how it all fits together.� In the past, if

someone lived long enough for type 2 to appear, his/her diet

(most people couldn't afford to overeat) and hard-labor

lifestyle kept the symptoms at bay, either long enough to

die of something else, or for the eventual fatality to be

put down to "old age."� When I was a child, the official

life expectancy of an American male was 67 years.� Medicine

has improved, we live longer, and more cases of type 2

appear.

We have far better tests now.� We can detect the

symptoms of type 2 years before we would have, and

intervene.� A person with insulin resistance, judged "at

risk" of developing diabetes, can turn to diet and exercise,

the "healthy lifestyle" espoused thousands of years ago by

Greek physician Hippocrates of Kos.� It won't eliminate the

trait (the genetic predisposition toward type 2), but it

will retard its expression (full-blown diabetes), and (a

free gift from Hippocrates to us), it can partially, or even

completely, reverse the symptoms of type 2.

No two cases of diabetes are alike.� We don't know all

the factors involved, so prediction cannot be precise.� But

we do know that a person with the gene for type 2 diabetes,

who lives a healthy lifestyle, will probably express

(develop diagnosable) diabetes later, with less severity, or

not at all.� We know that someone who has already been

diagnosed with overt type 2 diabetes, who adopts a healthy

lifestyle, will slow, maybe even stop, the disease process.

That should be reason enough.