It's YOUR FAULT!

Type 2
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I was just reading something from the ADA website, an article on Type 2’s.

And it made it seem like to me that getting Type 2 is our fault.

Quoted:

"Type 2 diabetes has a stronger link to family history and lineage than type 1, and studies of twins have shown that genetics play a very strong role in the development of type 2 diabetes. Race can also play a role.

Yet it also depends on environmental factors. Lifestyle also influences the development of type 2 diabetes. Obesity tends to run in families, and families often have similar eating and exercise habits.

If you have a family history of type 2 diabetes, it may be difficult to figure out whether your diabetes is due to lifestyle factors or genetics. Most likely it is due to both. However, don’t lose heart! Studies show that it is possible to delay or prevent type 2 diabetes by exercising and losing weight. Learn how you can prevent or delay type 2 diabetes."

( Your Children’s Risk):

“Type 2 diabetes runs in families. In part, this is due to children learning bad habits—eating a poor diet, not exercising—from their parents. But there is also a genetic basis.”

SOURCE: https://www.diabetes.org/diabetes/genetics-diabetes

I have a long family history of Type 2.

MOMS: My Mother, her sister, Brother (type 1), Their Father, cousin ( In remission), and 2 Great Aunts

So out of 6 kids on moms side 3 out of 6 are diabetic!

DADS SIDE : My Grandma

I know 2 people at our church ( husband and wife) that are as skinny as can be, they’re in their 80s and are type 2 diabetics.

Is it true? being cursed with Type 2 is our fault because we were Fat A**es who ate wrong and didn’t put in as much effort to exercise?

Sorry for the curse word, thats just how I feel about the article. To me it’s just how I took reading the information. As it’s your fault you got yourself in this predicament.

Thanks,

Chris

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Genetics play a huge role in what we are more susceptible to getting. But it is not usually a guarantee you will get it. Other factors, lifestyle factors for one can influence whether we get something we are genetically prone to or not.

Heart disease runs in my family. My parents, 2 grandparents, my brother all died from heart issues. One sister has already had issues and the other just has a minor mitral valve prolapse she’s had since she was young, she has followed a very healthy diet since her 20’s.

I would say it’s probably somewhere in my future, but I have no signs yet of anything being wrong, the rest of my family has had cholesterol issues and takes meds, I’ve never had a cholesterol issue. The possible difference because we are all overweight, is me being a vegetarian since I was 11 and a vegan since I was 28. There are some factors we can control and it can make a difference in what happens to us.

So yes, genetics can be a major issue, we are all overweight and not one of us has type 2 diabetes. But if you eat twinkies and soda and know it’s a family issue I would say yes, it becomes your fault.

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So I just read this…

" 3. Diabetes is my fault.

“Diabetes is a genetic problem that you inherit from your relatives,” says Cotton. While environment and lifestyle choices might make the disease show up a little earlier, people don’t get diabetes if they don’t have the genes for it, she says. But feeling guilty and blaming yourself is part of the emotional response to a diabetes diagnosis, along with denial, anger, and depression. “The emotions related to diabetes will come and go over time,” says Cotton. “Sometimes you’ll feel like you are really capable of handling the disease and other days you’ll feel like throwing caution to the wind. That’s reality. That’s real life and it’s normal.”

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So does that mean its kind of not my fault if this says its genetic which I am going to guess that means it runs in your family? And that because I got up to 296 LBS it caused it to come on sooner than later on in my life but I would of eventually got diabetes anyways?

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People say it’s your fault with type 2 because you can keep it at bay with diet for a while.

LADA can be controlled with diet for a little while.

Ur really I know a few people who are obese and don’t exercise so are not diabetic. So it goes to show you genetics are the biggest driver of it.

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@CWM030 It is always the easy way out to blame the victims. People who are familiar with dairy animals have long noticed that some are “easy keepers.” Those are the ones who will pork up on little feed while not being big producers. The high producers are bony and convert all the protein they eat into milk. This also happens with other animals. Friends of our had 3 horses, a Thoroughbred, an Arab/Quarter horse mix and an Arab and something else. The thoroughbred ate a huge amount of feed or would be skin an bones, The A/Q half the amount and the last one got no feed or she became fat, hay and grazing only.

We human animals are no different. Some of us are easy keepers. My hypothesis is this is a survival thing. In times of famine it would always be good for some to survive by going into storage mode. The thoroughbreds might make the great hunters but don’t do well in hard times.

I suspect that the famine triggers in our modern world of food plenty come from enzymatic changes in food that is processed and frankly old. We seldom get really fresh food. If I am right this causes insulin resistance which banks the fires and stores up for the coming starving time which never comes. The following quote is from “Defining the genetic contribution of type 2 diabetes mellitus”

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is a so-called multifactorial disease in which the genes (loci) not only interact with each other but also with environmental factors.
https://jmg.bmj.com/content/38/9/569

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Here’s how I think about it - If you live long enough, your organs will start to fail. Its the natural progression of aging that organs crap out. We used to only live to be 40 and the pancreas is a ■■■■ organ to begin with because its unusually prone to failure.

A pancreas is like a alternator in your car - it just doesn’t last forever. You can drive without an alternator for a long time (if you park on a hill and pop the clutch to start it up), but that’s not ideal so you wanna do what you can to decrease the statistical likelihood of failure.

I’m not a huge fan of blaming people for illness. Illness is a natural part of the human condition. It’s more unusual for people to NOT encounter illness during their lifetime. At the same time, some people are really motivated to NOT get diabetes. I don’t find diabetes that scary of an illness, but the threat of it really does help motivate some people to change the conditions of their bodies. Some people have that option and some people don’t.

A lot of Americans sit at a desk for 8 hours a day at work and its really physically bad for them for lots of reasons - its harder on your body than working construction. American cities are not constructed for walking to work. Many people have a 2 hour commune per day. Many people would actually need to warp space and time to allow for exercise in a day. Its not easy to figure out how to accomplish this. It might not always be possible. We are all a bunch of fat asses compared to the French. Can you imagine American women in their 40’s walking around it heels? That exists in France and Italy. Its mind blowing.

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I wrote this post 8 years ago, many of you have seen it before, I like to drag it out when the subject of blame rears it head.

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Gary, this is something I don’t quite understand fully. My husband borders on being pre diabetic because of medications that he takes. He is quite thin. Our 32 yr old son is addicted to food. The more weight that he gains the higher his A1c climbs. It is 5.8 now. He is about 50 lbs overweight. I have a difficult time not believing that becoming a type 2 is almost a choice he is making. I have read that being addicted to food is like having diabetes. It isn’t a choice that people are making. There will probably soon be a medication that will reduce people’s appetites. I hope that it is on the market before my son is diagnosed with diabetes.
Our son also has full blown Tourette’s Syndrome with Coprolalia and he has BP 2.
His genetics are a mess. His grandmother was also BP2.

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@marilyn So when you say ". I have a difficult time not believing that becoming a type 2 is almost a choice he is making. "

You’re blaming us for becoming Type 2’s? It was our choice to become diabetic? I call BS on that. I didn’t choose to become one.

I read today that if one parent has diabetes that their kids have a 40% chance of becoming one. If both parents have diabetes then they have a 70% chance of becoming one.

And mother’s that carry babies over 9 LBS or have gestational diabetes are at risk for becoming a Type 2. ( she had both, a 10 pound baby and gestational )

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Chris, like I said, I am trying to figure this out and I am only talking about my son. He only weighed a bit over 6 lbs at birth. Yes, I am a type 1, but no one else in my family had diabetes. My son’s A1c goes up as he puts on weight. On the other hand his grandmother was about 50 lbs over weight, died at 89 and never was diagnosed with diabetes.

I am just trying to figure out if weight gain has anything to do with SOME cases of type 2 diabetes.

I would do anything to help my son not become a diabetic.

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Oh Marilyn, I just can’t seem to find the correct words to express my strong feelings on this subject. This is my third or fourth attempt at expressing myself.

I believe that before my diabetes was evident, while I was still a slim young man I was a T2 diabetic. If I were not already T2 then quitting smoking and gaining weight would not have had the devastating effect it did on me. People gain weight all the time without going through the symptoms that I have. The human body is designed to safely store fat for energy when food is scarce, why couldn’t my body do this, perhaps because the disease was already there. This is why there is debate about curing T2. You cannot cure it you can only put it the symptoms into remission. The disease will always be there waiting for its chance to triumph again.

No one choses to be T2 and no one choses to remain T2. Many people successfully avoid or reverse their T2 symptoms and some don’t, I applaud those that do.

I refuse to believe that anyone makes the decision to continue suffering the effects of T2. I believe that they have tried and possibly failed. I cannot blame someone for failing because I and no one else knows why they may have failed. It is not on me or anyone else to judge and lay blame, it is only up to me to support their efforts.

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Bless you @Marilyn6 for being the mother that you are.

I wish I had some wisdom beyond what is known already but all you can really do is to continue to fight against the biggest contributing factor, his weight gain, it is a difficult battle and I have a feeling his Tourette’s make it even more difficult.

Building on my last post I will say that I believe T2 already exist in most T2s long before they are diagnosed or even suspected. Perhaps this is true for your son. There is speculation that T2 is the trigger for weight gain not the other way around. I believe it is T2’s primary means of waging battle.

You must fight against his weight gain, removing or blunting this weapon that T2 uses is the most important thing.

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Thank you for the beautiful posts Gary, and thank you for the effort it took to write them. You brought tears to my eyes. I will think about what you said about type 2 maybe contributing to my son’s weight gain. He just has so much to deal with already, that I would hate to see him have to deal with having diabetes.

I have to remember that I didn’t actually take my diabetes seriously until I was diagnosed with retinopathy. I was in my early 30’s. I think the fact that diabetes can be ignored until it causes damage to one’s body is one the most frightening parts of this disease.

I will try my best not to blame him for not losing weight, but realize, more than I already do, that there are many forces at work.

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@Marilyn6 First off let me apologize for jumping the gun amd getting offended :pensive:

I really didn’t ask for this, If I could go back, I would.

So odd no one in your fam is a T1 but you became one. I thought that for type 1, you had to have a family history to get it.

Chris

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No problem Chris, you are dealing with a lot and I admire you for coming here and asking questions, You will do fine, because you are trying really hard to take care of yourself.

No, type 1 just pops up in people and they don’t need to have a relative with it. Some people who get it recently had a virus. As far as I know I wasn’t sick at all until at 8 yrs old I lost about 20 lbs and almost died before my doctor finally tested my urine. My doctor and my family had never known anyone who had diabetes. That was in 1959.

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@Marilyn6 I am convinced that the excessive hunger, craving especially for carbohydrate rich foods is a direct result of cellular insulin resistance. Type 1 DMs prior to diagnosis have the 3 Ps, polydipsia, polyuria and polyphagia - excessive thrist, urination and hunger. The reason for the last one is because of the lack of insulin. In type 2 diabetes insulin resistance means that cells in need of glucose, their preferred fuel, are starving while swimming in a sea overly rich with glucose. These cells signal the need for food leading to excessive craving for carbs.

It is easy to think that the excessive weight is the cause of T2DM, but it is only what I call an aggravating symptom of insulin resistance. All that excess glucose gets stored in the liver and then fat cells while the skeletal muscles go without. That also leads to fatigue.

It is tough for any of us, but your son has other issues that make it harder. And does he take meds for the BP? Some of those cause weight gain all by themselves.

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Thanks so very much for taking the time to write this. I love your concern and your explanation. Our son developed Tourette’s at 6 and by the time he was 11 bipolar disorder. After having been on many very strong medications and an extremely high dose of lithium, I finally found a Canadian made vitamin which allowed me to decrease his medications at the age of 17. We fed him anything he wanted to eat while he was growing up so that he wouldn’t rage. I am sure that all the fatty processed food was very bad for him in the long run, but it helped keep him alive.

He is a wonderful intelligent young man, but was given more than anyone should have to deal with. Food is a huge comfort for him. He knows how hard I have had to fight to stay healthy, but it isn’t enough to keep him from eating. My mom was also addicted to food, but wasn’t a diabetic. I really don’t want to see our son have to deal with more.

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Most of type 1’s seem to carry a gene they inherit that can get activated by being exposed to an unknown virus. That seems to be the prevailing theory.

Type 2 is much more genetically inherited. But when a disease runs in a family it is not a guarantee to get it in almost every case. Although I’m sure which genes you actually inherit still play a major part. I still say there is still some choice involved. And sure you could be thin, exercise daily, eat well and still get type 2. But I also think that if both your parents have type 2 it is an early warning to be careful in your eating and life patterns.

So if you have two parents that have type 2 and you insist on downing sodas and sweets, that becomes a choice that says you are more likely to get type 2, maybe it’s just getting it sooner in life than not at all. But the benefits of delaying getting it are great too and it becomes your choices that help put you there. Sure in some families you can down all the sodas you want and never get diabetes, but other families, no.

Eating junk is not good for anyone, it just catches up with some in more serious ways than in others.

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I think T2 is one of those things where you LIKELY get a genetic propensity. Whether that propensity to get T2 manifests itself is influenced, but not solely determined by your diet and exercise regime.

I have T2. No one in my family has T2, or ever had T2. I have a great grandmother who was T1, but I don’t take after that side of the family. My a1c seems to be proportional to my weight. Lose weight while keeping the diet the same, a1c goes down.

In the end, I do not believe behavior is deterministic in getting T2. I think there are influences and the threshold for those variables for getting T2, well, vary person to person.

In the end, I’ll take T2 over cancer, heart disease, and a host of other things I see people have. :slight_smile: I like having SOME control over my destiny.

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I am Bipolar too! I got diagnosed in my mid 20’s.

And Food well, was comfort for me in HS because I went though SEVERE bullying in HS. It went from the time I got there at 7:30 until 2:55 when we were let out. And the first thing i’d do when I would get off the bus was raid the fridge :frowning:

But I’ve been husky all of my life even before moving and going to that horrible school I had to go to for 4 years.