The speed at which new cases of diabetes walk through a doctor’s door – it’s enough to make you wonder if it’s become contagious, like the common cold. How do you get diabetes? For this blog I’ll be referring to Type 2 diabetes.
How Do You Get Diabetes?
Carbs play a key role when it comes to diabetes. Carbs are broken down in your gut, before being absorbed into your bloodstream as glucose. Your body has to keep its blood glucose within a narrow range – too low and you can’t function, too high and it damages your body.
When you eat carbs your blood glucose level goes up, and your body responds by producing insulin. When insulin reaches certain cells, for example your fat cells, they respond by pulling the glucose in (and in the case of fat cells it is turned into fat). Lots of cells around your body pulling glucose into them, under insulin’s influence, brings your blood glucose down.
Humans didn’t eat a lot of carbs prior to agriculture. This was only about 10,000 years ago, a small blip in evolutionary time. Therefore we haven’t evolved to cope with a lot, so we aren’t equipped to cope with today’s carb-loaded diet.
We’ve covered a bit of background, so how do you get diabetes?
Many people repeatedly eat far too many carbs on a daily basis, and here’s an example of how easy it is to do:
- cereals or toast for breakfast
- sandwiches for lunch
- pasta or potatoes for dinner
When you repeatedly do this, you repeatedly make your body produce lots of insulin.
Because we are not designed to have high levels of insulin, the cells in our body get a bit fed up with all this insulin continually knocking at the door, especially so loudly. They get desensitised and start to ignore it – this is known as insulin resistance.
But you still have the problem of loads of glucose keep pouring into your system, it still needs dealing with. So your body produces even more insulin, trying its best to control your high blood glucose levels.
When this keeps happening (because of your carb-loaded diet) you end up with massive levels of insulin doing the job of what only small levels used to take care of. You are probably getting fatter too, because whenever insulin in present you are laying down fat.
At some point your body can’t cope and your insulin production can’t keep up. As a result your blood glucose starts to increase. You are now diabetic.
At the route of all this was a carb-loaded diet.
The real solution to type 2 diabetes is correcting the problem that caused the disease in the first place.
The general approach of the NHS to diabetes is extremely poor in my opinion. There is little time or expertise available to help people reverse their diabetes. Instead they are given cursory dietary advice and filled up with pills. At some point they might end up on insulin injections too.
If you haven’t got a copy of my free guide that shows you how to lose weight and get in tune with your body – click here.
If you have any experience of type 2 diabetes I’d love to hear about it, perhaps leave me a comment this week?
Uber Health to you.
Dr Julie
Hi Dr Julie, how would you know if you have this problem, is there any signs to look for? X
Hi Caz, that’s a great question.
The obvious signs are excessive thirst and pee-ing a lot. People often feel very tired too.
However, these are fairly late signs and all will have not been well for some time before this.
Type 2 diabetes isn’t exclusive to overweight people, but they’re more likely to get it. More and more these days, doctors are checking overweight people for diabetes, by checking for glucose in their urine or blood glucose levels.