The risk factors that the medical industry consider are “pretty clear” serious risk for type 2 diabetes. factors are:
1. a lack of exercise,
2. a poor diet and obesity,
3. genes, and ethnicity.
In this case I would say, with some rare exceptions, it is “none of the above”!
Medical research has found correlation between type 2 diabetes and the above conditions but not evidence. Correlation is not causation! Correlation is not even evidence.
The myth of lack of exercise.
How much does exercise contribute to a person’s overall metabolic function? I would say that exercise does help a person maintain better health but I don’t think a lack of exercise can cause disease. There are at least two pieces of evidence. One is the millions incarcerated. Those in jails only get half an hour to an hour a day to walk around outside their cells. Some people in jails suffer diseases. Their confinement does not cause disease. People in mental hospitals don’t even get an hour a day to go outside even to see daylight. They do not develop more disease due to their confinement.
The other piece of evidence I’ll give involves spiritual practices. I have done many spiritual retreats, which involve intensive meditation. Certainly there were breaks for meal and to do chores, wash etc. Minimum sitting meditation requirements were typically 16 hours per day. Some people, myself included, sometimes I sat up to 20-22 hours of sitting meditation per day. And the other hours I never did any exercise. I washed, ate and wrote in my diary. And I can say that at the end of the week I felt extremely healthy, energetic and experienced exceptional highs. And the good feeling lasted for days, sometimes weeks after the retreat. Some retreats ran for two months, so two months of physical immobility and I had no ill effects. But I will say that sitting in meditation is a long way different from sitting in front of the television for 6 or 8 hours a day.
Retirement and lack of exercise.
After my parents retired their level of activity drastically decreased. My mother did do all of the household chores but my father did far less. In the initial year he had dug up the back yard of their new house and made rows in which he planted vegetables such as tomatoes and some fruit trees. But from then on most of the gardening work was moving the hose every once in a while and picking his produce or planting new seedlings. They had local shops close by but they also had a fair walk to go to other shops. However every week or so they had me drive them to the supermarket to do their shopping so the amount of physical activity they did was minimal. For the great bulk of the time my father sat in front of the television set, probably 8 hours every day. They ate a lot of food every day, mostly carbohydrates and both of them became obese. They went to Greece every two years and stayed for many months each time and they might have been a bit more active in Greece than in Australia. They lived a sedentary life for about 35 years, all of their retirement, and neither one of them got diabetes.
..so poor diet another myth.
A poor diet is another one I question. And the proof of the pudding is in the eating!
From a few years old until I went to university, with the exception of a couple of years, my family lived in shop and house dwellings. I, one of my siblings and my biological mother all ate loads of carbohydrates. You could say we raided both shops’ stock of carbohydrate based merchandise like a plague of locust. My father used to buy two or three boxes of ice creams and chocolates of the various brands just so that he could get to sell some. We also drank soft drinks and most particularly coca-cola. I am talking about 16 years with high daily intakes of sugar and none of us got diabetes. We were a bit chubby but hardly fat. And it is true to say we were all very active. However none of us developed insulin resistance. So I reject the idea that insulin resistance is caused by eating a poor diet.
I can see other reasons why people, who eat what is called “a bad diet” and junk food, develop insulin resistance. It has nothing to do with the fiction of glucose intolerance. These people are using food and the digestion process as a means of self-medicating. Eating can be a coping habit. And the irony is that the medical industry is to some extent been responsible for the obesity epidemic.
To sell their cholesterol lowering drugs they declared fats are bad for you. People looked to eat less fat and processed food manufacturers replaced fats with sugars in order to keep foods they made still tasty. The problem is this. If you are stressed, you can use digestion as a coping habit. If you eat something you will trigger the digestive process and that is facilitated by the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). This is relevant because the PNS is also responsible for bringing the body to rest and in fact the body is brought close to rest for digestion to take place. That is why you should rest after eating and not engage in strenuous exercise. If you eat something fatty or greasy then you trigger the PNS longer because fats are digested late in the digestion process and need bile which is secreted after a PNS stimulus. If you cut fats from your diet then you lose this extended digestion effect and the relief it brings because the body is rested longer. So the person, who uses eating as a coping habit, will eat a bit more to get the same effect. If the food they eat has sugar or fructose or higher amounts of these, then of course they will put on more weight than if they had eaten the lesser amount of food with the fat in it. So overweight is the side effect. Certainly working out what the issues are and eliminating or reducing the stress is best but I still would not be criticizing these people because there are plenty of drugs that are at the end of the day only coping methods because they only treat symptoms and they too can cause overweight problems.
The stress issue that is causing the insulin resistance is at its core the reason why they are self-medicating. The stress they feel is due to toxic others in their lives and the foul games that those toxic others play. However you can overcome the problems and the stress and either never develop diabetes or become, like me an ex-diabetic.
Diabetes on a good diet with plenty of activity.
When I got diabetes I was in my early 40s and I could say I had a very good diet at the time. I had stopped eating so many sweets after my father sold the last shop and retired. I was in my second year at university. I know of others, who had developed diabetes and they had, unlike me, had good diets all of their lives. I can’t say I never ate fast food and sweets anymore, I did, but I ate little of these types of foods. I cooked my own meals both when I was single and after I got married. I am Greek-Australian so I eat a lot of Greek food. Why is a Mediterranean diet beneficial to health? The question is, is it? I think other practices of people who live in Southern Mediterranean countries are more important to health than their diets.
I was in Greece for a 4 month holiday in the mid 1970s and I encountered a practice that I had only heard of. After eating they would sleep for 2 hours. At the time there was diabetes in Greece but it was not a bad problem as it is today. I was amazed that sleeping after a meal was so beneficial because they needed four peak hours of traffic to go home for their midday meal and sleep. And the traffic in Athens as I remember was a nightmare. I saw countless scenes of police whistling to no avail. Cars whizzed around them in all directions. People hardly even slowed down. And where there were crashes most got out, screamed at each other for 5 or 10 minutes, then got in their cars and drove away. And of course everyone held up would blast their horns in a cacophony as the scene was going on. You would think that a 12 hour working day, by the time you add the 4 hours for lunch, sleep and travel, with four peak hours of traffic of nightmarish proportions would have been seriously stressful. And yet they were happy and healthy. It was only when they stopped the practice of sleeping after lunch every day that the diabetes incidence sharply increased.
It is true that they incorporated more American fast foods in their diet but the Greek fast foods as I recall had a high fat content and plenty of sugar. They have always eaten sweets that drip with sugary syrups. So I doubt that the diet made a difference. The other big difference was that Greece adopted a more American-like lifestyle. There has been a dismantling of the old community connectedness, where people in the entire neighborhood and not only within families looked after one another. I recall one day, when I was not feeling so well, I stayed home. A neighbor I hardly knew knocked on my door. “We didn’t see you around today are you okay?” And she had brought me some soup. In Australia not only would they not care if they saw you or not, there are plenty of cases where people have died in their homes and were only found dead 5 or 6 months later.
Obesity is also considered a cause of diabetes. There is a higher percentage of diabetics amongst people who are obese however not all obese people get diabetes and there are thin people who also develop diabetes. Those who are obese and who have diabetes and who have undergone surgery to reduce the size of their stomach in order to lose weight do sometimes reverse their insulin resistance but they don’t lose the weight instantly. They lose the weight over time. And they don’t get cured of diabetes either. There are other reasons for the reduction in insulin resistance. I don’t believe that obesity causes diabetes and I even doubt that it causes insulin resistance. It is stress that is the core problem.
Kyrani
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An ex-Type 2 Diabetic's Blog 