“The original post with regard to people is not appropriate for our discussions. The commentator must not have grasped that we support people on this website, we do not put them down. Perhaps he will grasp the meaning of community and withdraw this item.”
No can do I stand by my original post.
There is completely overwhelming and undeniable evidence that in far more than 90 percent of the cases of type 2 diabetes in humans there are two components - genes that make you susceptible to getting type 2, and lifestyle/habits that trigger type 2.
Many people have the genes but thanks to living a healthy life with regular activity (after all, face it, humans were never meant to sit on their butt all day) and healthy eating, they never develop diabetes type 2. Also there are people who are overweight/obese, with unhealthy eating habits and zero exercise who never develop diabetes because they lack those genes that make them susceptible. It is somewhat similar to another disease, lung cancer. We have all heard about the 90 year old who has smoked a 20 pack a day since they were a teenager and never developed lung cancer - they lacked the susceptibility gene for lung cancer. We should also have heard of the 40 year old who never smoked a cigarette but whose parents and siblings smoked while they were around, and who died of lung cancer in middle age. Obviously they had the genes.
Since there are no tests that can tell people if they have the genes that make them susceptible to diabetes type 2, the safest would be if everyone lived a healthy lifestyle with regard to what they eat, exercise and weight control. Unfortunately that is far from the case in North America today.
According to the Mayo Clinic which most reasonable people would regard as one of the more valid online sources of information:
“Causes
Type 2 diabetes develops when the body becomes resistant to insulin or when the pancreas stops producing enough insulin. Exactly why this happens is unknown, although genetics and environmental factors, such as excess weight and inactivity, seem to be contributing factors.”
So, I’m a scientist, and when I make strong statements such as yours, I’m expected to back that up with actual sources. Now, I’m not suggesting you are a scientist, but since people are calling you out on this, I highly suggest you cite your sources. Can you provide an overwhelming amount of evidence that 90% of Type 2 diabetics triggered onset with “lifestyle/habits?”
And I hate to break it to you, but there are many people who develop lung cancer without having ever smoked a cigarette. It appears to me that you are failing to distinguish “correlation and cause” and “anecdotal observation and evidence.” If it makes you feel better, a failure to understand the way science works is most likely not genetic, and is curable.
I found that if you’re going to have a cat with a chronic condition, diabetes isn’t that hard to handle. I was really worried when my one of my cats got diagnosed since giving cats pills was always a nightmare and I imagined that giving an injection would be worse.
Turns out, giving a cat an injection is cake.
Since they have a spot on the back of their neck with very few nerves, you can just give them their insulin injection there and they don’t really even notice it. For my cat, medicine time is just a time when I call her and give her a bit of extra love and attention.
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!
Yeah, I was going to reply, but I suspect you’re right. Feeding trolls just makes them more powerful. It is rather horrifying to meet a cannibalistic troll however: the self-hatred is strong.
The etiology of Type 2 diabetes is a perennial “hot topic”; as with most areas of medical/scientific knowledge, our understanding of it continues to develop and evolve with time and study.
Discussions about this topic regularly give rise to strong feelings and even stronger expressions. Expressing strong opinions is healthy and welcome here; expressing them in snarky or personal ways is not. This discussion is approaching the edge of the envelope. Please be respectful to one another so that the discussion can (a) continue, and (b) remain constructive.
