DIABETES RESEARCH RIGHT NOW! #12: NEW Cause of Diabetes???

From the first moment I discovered I had been diagnosed with DIABETES, I joined a HUGE “club” that has been rapidly expanding since it stopped being a death sentence in the early 20th Century. Currently, there are about HALF A BILLION PEOPLE who have Type 2 Diabetes. For the past 3500 years – dating back to Ancient Egypt – people have suffered from diabetes. Well, I’m one of them now… Not one to shut up for any known reason, I added a section to this blog…

Every month, I’ll be highlighting Diabetes research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you. Today: STARTING with a 2014 article, “Diabetes – Will it Ever be cured?”; I check up on the various therapies mentioned…

“A new study by researchers at Lund University provides increased support for the idea that epigenetic changes can cause type 2 diabetes. The researchers behind the new findings published in Nature Communications now aim to develop methods for disease prevention.” (Link below for the Science Digest condensed version!)

OK – so what does this mean? The key words are “epigenetic changes”.

You already know that we get our genes – hair color, body build, bone structure, even aspects of personality – from our parents. We’re made up of half of each parent’s DNA.

Now, the DNA doesn’t come out in us as a PERFECT half Mom-half Dad proportions. I can look more like my mom and my sister can look more like our dad than us being perfect blends of both parents.

The same is also true for susceptibility to disease, ability to recover from injury, tendency toward receiving certain kinds of injury. For example, while I am NOT TALKING ABOUT PREDESTINATION!!!!, it’s possible that bone and joint structure can lead to some siblings having “bad knees” and others having no trouble at all. Some siblings may show early signs of heart disease, others may have no trouble. Still others my experience kidney stones, while no on else in the family has that challenge.

“Epigenetics is the study of how your behavior and the environment around you can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change your DNA sequence, but they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence.”

That was the simple explanation! How about this: you have you DNA. There’s ALL SORTS of information stored on there. Like say lung cancer is a big issue in your family. But when your parents got married, Dad insisted that because his parents died of lung cancer after smoking since they were old enough to hold a cigarette (and grew up in a house where Mom and Dad smoked like a coal-fired power plant). NO ONE IN HIS FAMILY WAS GOING TO EVER LET A CIGARETTE TOUCH THEIR LIPS.

While he dies of lung cancer, none of the ten kids ever have any kind of problem with lung cancer…because they weren’t exposed to the conditions that would “activate” the gene that would malfunction and allow them to develop lung cancer.

In fact, I spent my first six years of life with a dad who smoked regularly, yet I've never had a single issue in the sixty years since he stopped...

The article goes on to say: “…epigenetic changes that arise due to environmental and lifestyle factors can affect the function of genes.” And this means…what?

I have the genes that would let me develop Type 2 diabetes. If I had made different choices in my life: become a long-distance runner; learned to love exercise; paid even MODERATE attention to my diet (NOT just stop eating so much sugar…as I’ve pointed out before, TABLE sugar is SUCROSE; blood sugar is GLUCOSE. While related they are NOT the same. EVERYTHING you eat gets broken down into glucose – not just candy sugar! Fats, proteins, and carbohydrates all break down into glucose. Surprisingly, FAT is one of the biggest culprits of diabetes glucose surges. It’s why the October 23, 2023 article on the HealthLine website dings off 17 foods that can lower your blood sugar (aka GLUCOSE!!!)

They are (in no particular order): broccoli/broccoli sprouts; seafood (NOT FRIED!!!); pumpkin/pumpkin seeds; nuts/nut butter (NOT SWEETENED!); okra (EWWW! Sorry, not a big okra fan!); flax seed; beans and lentils; chia seeds; kimchi/sauerkraut (sauerkraut (EWWWW!) I love kimchi!); kale; BERRIES (any kind!); avocados; oats/oat bran (dark chocolate chip oatmeal cookies sweetened with monk sugar?…can’t even tell the difference!); citrus FRUITS (not citrus DRINKS! They have tons of sugar-added); kefir and yogurt (a plus for me is the yogurt adds calcium – one cup, twice a week, keeps my legs from cramping!); eggs; apples (we live in Minnesota – we INVENTED some of the most popular apple varieties and we’ve gone apple picking every fall for years now!)…

So – even if you come from a family with parents who have Type 2 diabetes – you can make good choices NOW and prevent the same fate!

Links: 17 Foods to Lower Your Blood Sugar (healthline.com);
Image: https://asploro.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Diabetes-Research_Open-Access.jpg