[Tinki]

I don't believe in a "blanket statement" for why someone becomes diabetic. In my personnal opinon I think it's one of three things.

1. Too many carbs, not enough exercise and your pancrease gets over loaded and doesn't function right.

2. genetic

3. certain medical conditions bring about diabetes

I fall under the category of too many carbs and sitting on my butt too much. However, I do feel that everyone is different. I just met a guy who became diabetic because he let a colon problem go for too long. Others have become diabetic from bad gall bladders and the list goes on. And there are others out there who work out, at a healthy weight and eat right but are still diabetic.

But honestly, I don't care why I became diabetic or what I can blame it on. The only thing that matters to me right now is dealing with it and keeping it under the best control I can.

[PERKDOUG]

A quote from volleyball:

[In the past 35 was the average years of life, maybe if their diabetes were managed, the average age may have jumped to 45 or more.]

I wanted to amplify on your point. The low life expectancy of those periods was principally due to the high death rate for children due to infectious disease. If you went back in time 200 years, you would find plenty of middle aged and elderly people with the population mix not differing greatly from today. There were plenty of 70, 80 and 90 year olds. The grave yards are another matter. It was not uncommon for a family with 3 surviving children to have 2 in the graveyard. I have visited several old graveyards and was amazed at the numer of children's graves. Their deaths bring down the averages significantly. Back then if your could get past childhood you had a reasonable chance to make 60 or 70 and as today a small chance to make 90.

[volleyball]

Death of children is irrelevant. maybe some were type one and that makes it relevant. Accidents, natural disaster and a host of other things all make up an average. If it were just diabetes, then instead of 45, it may be 75.
And there was no mention of time frame. Could be 2000 years ago.
We have populations today that have an average age of 35, we can look at them but it is not the same as ancient times as modern food stuffs make it into most current populations.
A person then or today may have been destined to live 140 years but was taken by war at age 20.
Humans have not evolved much since our calendar began.
My point being that the Egyptians or any other race may have fallen victim to processed foods and lived shorter lives.

[REDLAN]

I'm not sure why, we have drifted into a discussion about diabetes from the past, and whether we live any longer now or not, and whether the dismal life expectancies of the past have any bearing on the development of type 2 now.

The general argument seems to run like this....

back in the past when we ate healthy wholegrain unprocessed food, and hunted animals that ran wild, we never had all these terrible diseases. Therefore our modern lifestyles must be unhealthy and lead to disease.

(it's actually an unscientific argument in the sense that the hypothesis is untestable - but this is another story)

so we have arguments that refined carbohydrates are the cause of diabetes - just look at the native american indians, once the white man introduced white flour, they started getting diabetes...

Anyway I was curious to find out what american indians ate prior to the arrival of the Europeans, and like many peoples they had a varied diet, some hunted and fished, and some farmed, and what did they grow?

well that would be maize. And what did they make this into?

Two commonly eaten foods among the Iroquois, historically, were corn bread and corn soup. Bread was made by pounding corn into flour.

and what did the iroquois eat their bread with?

The bread was often eaten with maple sugar or syrup

plenty of refined carbs in the iroquois diet then

Link below so you can read about all the other foods that different american indian peoples ate.

American Indians: Prehistoric Indians and Histor...: Information and Much More from Answers.com

Maize it appears was a widely consumed food source. So it would appear that many native american indians were eating refined carbohydrates before the arrival of the white man.

Your real problem though in using historical data to construct this kind of argument is that your data could be corrupted by a whole host of confounding factors, which you can't go back and measure. I can think of one straight off the top of my head...

heart disease and diabetes go hand in hand. They also go hand in hand with dispossessed peoples of any group/religion/diet. People under stress tend to live short lifespans - and they tend to die of heart disease and be somewhat prone to diabetes.

And here's the real rub....

I honestly can't see what relevance somebody living 200 years could possibly have on the incidence of disease today.

what matters is how people respond today. Go and find the data showing that if you feed one group refined carbs and the other healthy wholefoods and wild animal meat, that those eating the refined carbs get type 2 diabetes in abundance.

me I'm not going to look, because I'm fairly sure I know what I will find....

nada, nil, nothing zilch

PS I would really like somebody to surprise me

[PERKDOUG]

I see that I was unable to get my point across. But, I am just learning to put ideas into words.

[BlueSky]

Originally Posted by REDLAN

.... Go and find the data showing that if you feed one group refined carbs and the other healthy wholefoods and wild animal meat, that those eating the refined carbs get type 2 diabetes in abundance.

me I'm not going to look, because I'm fairly sure I know what I will find....

nada, nil, nothing zilch

PS I would really like somebody to surprise me

You won't find any studies on this because the effect you are referring to doesn't lend itself to controlled scientific study. It would have to be done over the full life cycle (70+ years) and there is no way of blinding results. Also, I don't think you would find too many participants willing to dedicate their lives to eating bad food so you can find out what happens.

You will have to rely on observational commentary for the insights you are looking for. And there are tons of it around. It all points pretty much in the same direction. Excessive amounts of high carb processed food combined with limited exercise increases the incidence of diabetes and various other health problems too. The fact that these assertions are essentially speculative is not a good enough reason reject them, IMO. There are simply no better explanations.

From a common-sense point of view, if it isn't food and sedentary living that is causing the problem, what else could be causing the diabetes epidemic?

[Hammer]

Just to add to the confusion, I don't think that adding refined foods to the mix would have changed anything. The one thing that I think is the over riding factor here is the active lifestyle. Back when the Indians were eating their own food, they had to grow it, harvest it, grind it, and prepare it. Plus they had to hunt, fish, etc. All this activity would have burned up any excess carbs they would have eaten, so diabetes would have been rare.

Another example of this is in the early 1900's at logging sites. The loggers had to chop trees by hand, move them by hand, and do whatever else was needed get the trees to the sawmills by hand. The camps that were setup for these men had cooks prepare meals for the men that were 9,000 calories each. They knew the energy these men needed to do their jobs, and they needed to fill them up with as many calories as they could. It was rare to find any of these men with diabetes.

If we had to provide for ourselves like the settlers did, you could eat whatever you wanted and still not develop diabetes. Of course, some people would still get it, but the incidence would be far lower than it is now. Our lifestyles now are usually hectic and don't allow time for proper eating. Instead of taking the time to have a decent meal, we'd grab a donut and a coffee on the way to work, a hamburger and soda for lunch. Our lifestyles are hectic but not very physical. We are rushing around doing things, but they aren't calorie burning things.

If we had to get up at 4am to milk the cows, feed the pigs, feed the chickens and horses, then go in and eat breakfast, only to go back out again to work the fields, come in for lunch, go back out to continue working the fields until we could finally stop, put everything away, then eat dinner, I guarantee that diabetes would be as rare as polio.

While diabetes comes from a number of sources, the biggest source has to be from not burning off the food we eat.

[volleyball]

200, and 2000 years ago are important in the quest. With the length of time for human reproduction, the span must increase. While you may get 100 generations of insects in 2 years, you''ll need 2000 years for humans.
And who to say that Native Americans did not have diabetes back then?
Manually mashing corn may not be to the level of refinement of current production facilities. Just like steel cut oats process in our bodies differently than rolled oats.
I don't consider raw maple syrup to be a refined carb. Do you know how much it was concentrated?
The Iroquois is but one of many different groups. The diet was varied by region.
There is not concrete data from the past. We must guess at what was really happening.

[Scrabblechick]

How about better medical tests? Stay with me, here. Many more people are being DX'ed much earlier, due to stunning advances in technology. Does this mean there are more diabetics? Maybe, maybe not. It conclusively proves more diabetics are being DIAGNOSED!

It could be that a more active lifestyle kept the D at bay a little longer, so some people were older by the time they were DX. Also, without many of the early warning tests and guidelines, which have changed completely even in the past 20years, people were being diagnosed much later, even if they had developed IR in their early adulthood. For example: in 1966, when my dad was DX, an FBG of about 180 was the guideline for diagnosis. That's far and away above the 115-120 now used. Plus, as I said in an earlier post, he was very physically active, not obese, etc. His father, not overweight, active all his life. Same for my great-uncle and three great-aunts. They grew up on a farm, BTW, and did a lot of hard, physical work. That branch of the family, as a whole, runs to rangy, lean body types.

My endo talked to me about being "the child of the survivors." He meant that, in the Southeastern U.S., after the Civil War, food was not plentiful. People (as they did in the UK during WWII) survived on very little for a long time, and in doing so, passed on that thrifty gene. Our bodies became very good at extracting the last iota of nutrient from what we ate. Unfortunately, as times got better and the food supply improved, our bodies didn't catch up with the evolution, and those who were genetically predisposed anyway, were, to put it politely, left in the morning without flowers or a card.

Margaret Mitchell romanticizes a lot of things in "Gone with the Wind," but her account of the diet at Tara during the War and Reconstruction is awful, as well as historically accurate. They had parched corn, peanuts, field peas (not sweet peas), sweet potatoes and whatever vegetables they could raise in gardens. Meat was not common. It's easy to see how the survivors sired children whose bodies took advantage of every bite.

That's one theory, and IMHO, one that makes a lot of sense.

I don't think we can pin the cause of D definitively on any one thing. I think humans are such a varied species that we may take many paths to arrive at the same disease. The end result is always the same, but the paths leading to it are widely divergent.

[fgummett]

Originally Posted by BlueSky

From a common-sense point of view, if it isn't food and sedentary living that is causing the problem, what else could be causing the diabetes epidemic?

I'm not discounting this as a possible cause BUT I am asking that we keep an open mind to other possibilities. I remind you again of Peptic Ulcers which were on the rise and quite obviously were caused by our fast-paced, high-stress lifestyle... made perfect common-sense... until they found out they are caused by an infection.
The biggest problem I have with the, "lifestyle choices = Type 2 Diabetes" argument is that it limits our options: we just keep coming back to "eat less and exercise more"..! Which again sounds like perfect common-sense but it is a platitude that had been spouted for 50 years or more with little real hope of it making any difference. I listed above the reasons why it is doomed to fail once we have already reached a diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes... perhaps it can help provide motivation for the next generation to avoid the pitfalls (if the above assumption is in fact correct), but how does it help me? On the other hand, when I read that gastric bypass surgery in many cases, seems to cure Type 2 D, immediately, and independently of any weight loss... meanwhile the doctors/scientists are not sure why or how it works... well that makes me question this basic assumption.

Science should be about questioning basic assumptions, not blindly following them.

[fgummett]

"It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it."
Jacob Bronowski

---

Originally Posted by Hammer

Another example of this is in the early 1900's at logging sites. ... It was rare to find any of these men with diabetes.

Your general argument makes a lot of sense and I don't mean to nit-pick... but what proof you have to back up that statement?

[cadcon]

Originally Posted by HelenM

Actually it does, doctors catering for the wealthier sectors of society describe the condition. It was in France, the UK and Germany, the first countries where sugar became readily available that the first documentation linking obesity, hypertension and diabetes ocured. There are few mentions before the 17th century.
A text book advocating diet and exercise for the treatment of adult diabetes ,« De la glycosurie ou diabète sucré » appeared in 1876. Its author Apollinaire Bouchardat, noticed that during the siege of Paris where food was restricted, the symptoms of his patients with diabetes improved. He in turn was influenced by an 18th C Scottish doctor John Rollo who thought that the origin of diabetes was in the stomach where starch was transformed to glucose, passing into the blood and causing hyperglycemia.
These doctors were not treating type 1, Bourchadat distinguises the types using the words diabète maigre (which quickly led to death) and diabète grasse (terms still sometimes used in France today).

HelenM, I respect your opinion but the book you site is limited in it's clinical analysis. The original post was concerened with
genetic predisposition vs life style and outside influencing factors. Based on what you post when we are exposed to our next "food restriction" everything will improve when in fact we see that even with improved diet and exercise it does not cancel out the condition. I understand you are trying to show documentation but that isn't it.

Respectfully,

Jim

[cadcon]

[quote=volleyball;347966]It is funny how we all assume that everyone was really physical in the past. There has always been people with power over others to do their manual work.

You know, That is a good point. Did Gout or Scurvey (sorry if they're spelled wrong) kill any body back then?

Jim

[Scrabblechick]

Scurvy was a known risk for British sailors. Henry VIII suffered from terrible gout. Actually, he probably was diabetic. He died, eventually, from septicemia which had set in a wound in his leg. He also suffered from infected boils, etc. He had many of the symptoms of T2. And in his youth, he was extremely physically active. He was an avid tennis player, hunter and equestrian. Nature or nurture? Chicken or the egg? What is the meaning of life? 42, actually. (For the Douglas Adams fans. )

[cadcon]

Originally Posted by Scrabblechick

Scurvy was a known risk for British sailors. Henry VIII suffered from terrible gout. Actually, he probably was diabetic. He died, eventually, from septicemia which had set in a wound in his leg. He also suffered from infected boils, etc. He had many of the symptoms of T2. And in his youth, he was extremely physically active. He was an avid tennis player, hunter and equestrian. Nature or nurture? Chicken or the egg? What is the meaning of life? 42, actually. (For the Douglas Adams fans. )

Thanks for the info Scrabblechick, I Love this history stuff.

I don't mean to push anybody's buttons.

Regards,

Jim