4 ms·

On my mother's side of the family they were practically vegetarian or normal as it was called back then. Vegetables all week and maybe on Sunday a roast probabl

On my mother's side of the family they were practically vegetarian or normal as it was called back then. Vegetables all week and maybe on Sunday a roast probably fowl of some sort. This was during the 1940s. There were nine children and the parents on a farm in a small rural area. So no extravagant purchases no pop, candy, etc. My mom told me one Christmas her present was an apple and she was excited! The apple came from the tree out back. Sounds good? But all the women (grandmother and aunts) in the family developed diabetes, one male (uncle) too. Type 2 diabetes isn't always due to a poor diet.

49para 6y ago
All carbohydrates become sugar, sugar elevates insulin, constantly elevated insulin leads to diabetes. I'm not sure all the causes of Type 2 diabetes but I would wager that the current epidemic of Type 2 Diabetes is caused by too much sugar.
- papeda 6y ago
  > All carbohydrates become sugar, sugar elevates insulin, constantly elevated insulin leads to diabetes. But my understanding is that some carbohydrates get turned into sugar more slowly, and this "flattens the curve" of blood sugar relative to consuming sugar.
- conistonwater 6y ago
  It is not currently established what the exact relationship is between sugar in your diet, obesity, diabetes. They are all basically risk factors for the next one, but they definitely don't cause (in the strict scientific meaning of the term) one another---there is nowhere near enough scientific evidence that would support that. There's enough uncertainty about the whole process that saying "avoid known risk factors" is about the best advice you can get.
deathgrips 6y ago
>Vegetables all week and maybe on Sunday a roast probably fowl of some sort. That's not a balanced diet.
bad_user 6y ago
These are anecdotes. 1. it doesn't matter what you eat, what matters are the calories; you could eat whole plants all day, but add a lot of added fat to your meals (e.g. French fries) or sugar, and there's plenty of potential for caloric excess, even from salads. And I don't know about your family, but my family living in the country side drank a lot of alcohol. 2. People have a "personal fat threshold", when that threshold is reached there's nowhere for the excess to go and people develop diabetes; this is why some people develop diabetes sooner than others. So yes, it is possible even for skinny people to get diabetes and genetics definitely play a role. I find it baffling that even on this site people don't understand the value of anecdotal evidence (near zero), or that evidence has to come from a clinical setting with a control group and that epidemiological data must "disprove the null hypothesis". Before trusting your own anecdotes, are you sure you isolated the variables? Have you watched them day in, day out? You know, it's a curious thing but overweight people in public don't eat much, overeating happens in private. You should read the evidence for "energy poisoning" and then take a more critical look at your family.
- rland 6y ago
  The evidence from clinicians and people who study this is pretty clear: genetics is a massive factor. There are monogenic forms: if you have the gene, you will get diabetes, often in your 20s or 30s, and there is nothing you can do about it. Further, diet is one of many factors. Those factors are: multiple (possibly unknown) genes, environment, gut microbiome, weight, and yes, diet. Here is a nice diagram that illustrates how many genes touch this thing: https://i.imgur.com/STg7X74.png https://i.imgur.com/STg7X74.png -- these are the most common 5-10% of markers! I know we're talking about type 2 here, but it's actually a bit insulting to declare "energy poisoning" and that they're piggish in private. It's what my 10 year old classmates told me when I was diagnosed t1d.
  - bad_user 6y ago
    Who said they are "piggish" in private? Certainly I did not and note that I myself am in this category. What I said is that overweight people tend to overeat in private, not in public. This is a fact. The cause of overeating can be debated of course. Eating is a primary instinct, we are not very rational when it comes to our primary drives and on the market there are certainly foods engineered to be overeaten. However it is undeniable that T2D happens because people eat too much. And before 1950, people did not get T2D so often because a majority of the population suffered from hunger and malnutrition. Humanity has never dealt with an abundance of food, especially an abundance of food high in calories. It's also not wrong to say that binging happens most often in private. Even if the reasons for why that happens are debatable. --- > "The evidence from clinicians and people who study this is pretty clear: genetics is a massive factor. There are monogenic forms: if you have the gene, you will get diabetes, often in your 20s or 30s, and there is nothing you can do about it." We agree that genetics play a big factor. However we disagree on the inevitability — the super low, almost inexistant rates of T2D in the 19th century disagree with you and evolution doesn't happen this fast, it takes thousands, tens of thousands of years for a gene to spread throughout the population and this assuming that it confers a massive survival or reproductive advantage to influence selection (e.g. ability of adults to tolerate lactose in Europe), otherwise it can take hundreds of thousands of years. Our genes did not change and we did not suffer from T2D before the 20th century, the far simpler explanation is that our environment changed, our genes cannot cope with it and the totality of evidence we have points to "energy poisoning", aka people eat too many calories.
anewdirection 6y ago
Nothing but vegtables, with meat once a week is not anywhere close a balanced diet. Veggies are mostly carbohydrate, which does not help either. But as most will point out, whith that many people affected in the family it is likely a genetic predisposition.

49para 6y ago

All carbohydrates become sugar, sugar elevates insulin, constantly elevated insulin leads to diabetes. I'm not sure all the causes of Type 2 diabetes but I would wager that the current epidemic of Type 2 Diabetes is caused by too much sugar.

papeda 6y ago
> All carbohydrates become sugar, sugar elevates insulin, constantly elevated insulin leads to diabetes. But my understanding is that some carbohydrates get turned into sugar more slowly, and this "flattens the curve" of blood sugar relative to consuming sugar.
conistonwater 6y ago
It is not currently established what the exact relationship is between sugar in your diet, obesity, diabetes. They are all basically risk factors for the next one, but they definitely don't cause (in the strict scientific meaning of the term) one another---there is nowhere near enough scientific evidence that would support that. There's enough uncertainty about the whole process that saying "avoid known risk factors" is about the best advice you can get.

deathgrips 6y ago

>Vegetables all week and maybe on Sunday a roast probably fowl of some sort. That's not a balanced diet.

bad_user 6y ago

These are anecdotes. 1. it doesn't matter what you eat, what matters are the calories; you could eat whole plants all day, but add a lot of added fat to your meals (e.g. French fries) or sugar, and there's plenty of potential for caloric excess, even from salads. And I don't know about your family, but my family living in the country side drank a lot of alcohol. 2. People have a "personal fat threshold", when that threshold is reached there's nowhere for the excess to go and people develop diabetes; this is why some people develop diabetes sooner than others. So yes, it is possible even for skinny people to get diabetes and genetics definitely play a role. I find it baffling that even on this site people don't understand the value of anecdotal evidence (near zero), or that evidence has to come from a clinical setting with a control group and that epidemiological data must "disprove the null hypothesis". Before trusting your own anecdotes, are you sure you isolated the variables? Have you watched them day in, day out? You know, it's a curious thing but overweight people in public don't eat much, overeating happens in private. You should read the evidence for "energy poisoning" and then take a more critical look at your family.

rland 6y ago
The evidence from clinicians and people who study this is pretty clear: genetics is a massive factor. There are monogenic forms: if you have the gene, you will get diabetes, often in your 20s or 30s, and there is nothing you can do about it. Further, diet is one of many factors. Those factors are: multiple (possibly unknown) genes, environment, gut microbiome, weight, and yes, diet. Here is a nice diagram that illustrates how many genes touch this thing: https://i.imgur.com/STg7X74.png https://i.imgur.com/STg7X74.png -- these are the most common 5-10% of markers! I know we're talking about type 2 here, but it's actually a bit insulting to declare "energy poisoning" and that they're piggish in private. It's what my 10 year old classmates told me when I was diagnosed t1d.
- bad_user 6y ago
  Who said they are "piggish" in private? Certainly I did not and note that I myself am in this category. What I said is that overweight people tend to overeat in private, not in public. This is a fact. The cause of overeating can be debated of course. Eating is a primary instinct, we are not very rational when it comes to our primary drives and on the market there are certainly foods engineered to be overeaten. However it is undeniable that T2D happens because people eat too much. And before 1950, people did not get T2D so often because a majority of the population suffered from hunger and malnutrition. Humanity has never dealt with an abundance of food, especially an abundance of food high in calories. It's also not wrong to say that binging happens most often in private. Even if the reasons for why that happens are debatable. --- > "The evidence from clinicians and people who study this is pretty clear: genetics is a massive factor. There are monogenic forms: if you have the gene, you will get diabetes, often in your 20s or 30s, and there is nothing you can do about it." We agree that genetics play a big factor. However we disagree on the inevitability — the super low, almost inexistant rates of T2D in the 19th century disagree with you and evolution doesn't happen this fast, it takes thousands, tens of thousands of years for a gene to spread throughout the population and this assuming that it confers a massive survival or reproductive advantage to influence selection (e.g. ability of adults to tolerate lactose in Europe), otherwise it can take hundreds of thousands of years. Our genes did not change and we did not suffer from T2D before the 20th century, the far simpler explanation is that our environment changed, our genes cannot cope with it and the totality of evidence we have points to "energy poisoning", aka people eat too many calories.

anewdirection 6y ago

Nothing but vegtables, with meat once a week is not anywhere close a balanced diet. Veggies are mostly carbohydrate, which does not help either. But as most will point out, whith that many people affected in the family it is likely a genetic predisposition.