Geek Out: Diabetes: More Than Just Diet And Doughnuts.
Bankrupt whole nations:
Whether we live in a country with a state-funded or private insurance-based healthcare system, the costs to individual and nations are enormous and getting worse. Interested? Below are links to 3 reports from the USA, the UK and New Zealand, discussing the looming financial crisis, caused by this disease.
People with undiagnosed diabetes mellitus:
Although at times I had to use slightly clumsy phrases like “people with diabetes” I deliberately didn’t describe people as “diabetics”. No one wants to be defined solely by their disease, so describing people as diabetics, epileptics or even asthmatics is strongly discouraged these days.
Two types:
It’s becoming clear that separating out the two types of diabetes mellitus into types 1 and 2 is oversimplifying and that many people may actually have a combination of the two or a disordered glucose/insulin relationship that doesn’t seem to follow the rules of either type.
DMT1/DMT2:
DMT1 used to be called juvenile-onset or insulin-dependent diabetes whereas DMT2 was called maturity or adult-onset diabetes or insulin-independent diabetes. These terms are much less commonly used now as we are seeing type 2 diabetes in juveniles these days, not just in the over-40s and some type 2 diabetes patients will need to use insulin as well as other medications.
Insulin’s most important role:
Insulin does more than help move glucose into cells. Think of it as a hormone to do with feasting, plenty and storage! Insulin’s released when we eat and the breakdown products of our diet start to move into our bloodstream. Insulin’s all about storing these useful molecules for later, when we haven’t eaten for hours so insulin helps to make fat which is of course, the ultimate form of energy storage!
It also helps to turn our dietary proteins into human proteins, and where do we have a lot of human protein? In our muscles! Some studies suggest as many as 25% of those people abusing anabolic steroids are also injecting themselves with insulin and that’s incredibly risky!!
Blood sugar:
You may well hear the term “plasma glucose” – the use of the word glucose now makes sense hopefully and plasma? That’s just the liquid part of blood (the other part being the blood cells) and the glucose is dissolved in the liquid part, hence plasma glucose!
Gets too high:
In case anyone’s wondering about a visit to the Cheesecake factory or eating a sack full of Halloween candy, our kidney’s have an absolute ton of capacity for preventing the loss of glucose from the body. Sitting on the sofa, binge watching Netflix whilst eating your body weight in chocolate will not cause glucose to end up in your urine – unless you have pre-diabetes or diabetes which you’re not yet managing appropriately. This shouldn’t be taken as support for regular Netflix and chocolate over-indulgence, more as a reminder of how wonderful our bodies are and how much our organs do to help us, sometimes despite our own indifference to our inner workings!!
Healthy pancreas:
Most of the cells of the pancreas are actually involved in producing digestive enzymes- chemicals that help break down the foods we eat. In DMT1, the immune system ignores most of the pancreatic cells but appears to specifically target the very small percentage of pancreatic cells (called beta cells) that produce insulin.
Insulin receptors:
Want to read more about these receptors? Consider going to our previous post (The keys that explain almost everything) where we talk all about these microscopic marvels.
Lose:
full disclosure – our cells are constantly making insulin receptors and insulin receptors are lost from our cells. In a healthy person there should be a balance between the production and loss of receptors, keeping the overall receptor number stable. In patients with DMT2, the loss of insulin receptors outpaces the production of new insulin receptors and so the overall number of insulin receptors decreases.
