David
Before I retired I was not a scientist, I was a journalist. In that capacity, working for the Reuter news agency, I got to travel to many parts of the world ranging from South America, to the Middle East and Western and Eastern Europe prior to the collapse of the iron curtain.
While scientists may have admirable rules for proving their hypothesis and theories, so do journalists, although with a different perspective.
My perspective was that I learned to trust my gut instincts and my actual observations and draw conclusions from them. For example. when I was in Chile in the 80s and observed soldiers of Pinochet;s fascist government machinegunning an elderly lady who was running a soup kitchen for the poor because running soup kitchens for the poor was forbidden, I concluded that I was watching evidence of a very brutal and murderous regime, something that was substantiated later through numerous interviews and observations. Were my analytics of the fascist Pinochet regime, which came to power when a gang of Reagan/CIA thugs murdered Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende in the early 70s, scientific? Nope. But my stories from Chile were published by newspapers in several countries and never rebutted. Fortunately, Pinochet is now history.
So that is where I am coming from.
Since my diagnoses with type 2 in 1998 I have been to annual refresher classes for type 2 diabetics at the St. Paul;s hospital Diabetes clinic in Vancouver. The vast majority of the participants have type 2 and of them thin or skinny people are as rare as icebergs in the Sahara desert. Inevitably, the rare thin ones always report they have type 1. That is not my only source of information of course but it is one from which I draw certain conclusions that some other people have difficulty in swallowing.
I happen to know what caused my diabetes type 2. Both my parents are born with the carrier gene of the mutation called hemochromatosis. It is the opposite of anemic in that the body absorbs too much iron, which ultimately damages internal organs like the liver and pancreas, creating a strong susceptibility to diabetes type 2. It is a fact that if one sibling has that mutation because both their parents have the mutated carrier gene, than all siblings will get it. As it happens, while I lived in Norway up until 1990 both I and my sisters lived healthy lifestyles, skiing in the winter, cycling in the summer, rather than driving, eating unprocessed foods and staying at a healthy weight. After I moved to Canada in 1990 I adopted a North American lifestyle, bought a car, ate fast food, and soon my weight went up from 170 lbs when I arrived here to 224 lbs when I was diagnosed with type 2. In the meantime my siblings continued their healthy lifestyles and despite having the exact same genes as me, never have shown any symptoms of type 2 diabetes. So that was the second observation that convinced me that I was correct in my hypothesis about type 2 being the sum of those type 2 genes and letting your guard down through lifestyle choices,
Of course that may sound like a very unpleasant truth to those who primarily want to confirm that ‘it is not my fault’. So be it, the solution is to look ahead and amend our bad habits not sulk by staying in the past when we had those unhealthy lifestyles that let us fall prey to the diabetes monster…
Anyhow, those were my thoughts on this subject today, thanks for reading!
