I always thought that eating a lot of sugar cause diabetes.
Um, it's a bit more complicated than that.
Diabetes is really common. One in 10 people have it. And
tens of thousands of people die from it every year. And according to a study done by the CDC,
by 2050 one in three Americans could have diabetes if things keep going the way they are.
If you have diabetes that's not kept in check, you have way too much sugar, specifically
glucose in your bloodstream. So it would be logical if eating a lot of sugar caused it.
To understand how sugar in your blood and sugar you eat are related, let's start at the beginning:
with how you process sugar. You eat something, say an apple, and as you digest it, you're breaking
down the larger sugars in that apple like sucrose into smaller ones like fructose and glucose,
which then get into your blood. As blood glucose levels rise. Your pancreas starts producing the
hormone, insulin. Insulin, and glucose travel through your bloodstream to your cells.
Insulin binds to its specific insulin receptor first. And that sends a signal,
telling your cells to let glucose in. Your cells use that glucose to produce energy,
energy that keeps your muscles moving, your brain working, and a lot of other important
processes that keep you alive. With diabetes, this whole process is thrown out of whack.
But how it's thrown out of whack depends on the type of diabetes.
In type one, your immune system destroys cells in your pancreas that produce insulin. With
less insulin available to bind to receptors on your cells, less glucose gets in and you're left
with a bunch of glucose in your blood. Type two diabetes is way more common than type one. It's
actually around 90% of all diabetes cases. In type two, your pancreas is producing insulin, but your
cells aren't responding to it. Usually because the signal telling your cells to let glucose in just
isn't getting through. this is called insulin resistance. With insulin resistance, your pancreas
has to make more and more insulin to keep up with rising blood glucose levels. For a while that
might work okay. And the amount of sugar in your blood will stay relatively normal, but over time,
your pancreas can't keep up. And just like with type one, you'll be left with a bunch of glucose
in your blood. Gestational diabetes is the type of diabetes someone gets when they're pregnant,
just like with type two, the pregnant person becomes insulin resistant. And I
actually didn't know this before doing research for this video, but between 30
and 50% of people with gestational diabetes go on to develop type two within the following decade.
So why is a lot of glucose in your blood a bad thing? First, if there's a lot of glucose in
your blood, chances are not enough glucose is getting into your cells, which is a problem.
Second, having too much sugar in your blood can also damage your blood vessels,
which means your blood won't circulate as well. And that puts you at risk for a heart attack,
stroke or kidney damage, as well as nerve and vision problems. Your kidneys try to solve that
problem by releasing any extra glucose into your urine, bringing a bunch of fluids from
your tissues with it, which is why most people who are starting to realize they might have diabetes
report feeling thirsty and also needing to pee all the time. As the disease progresses, the symptoms
become more serious. People often have trouble recovering from infections or healing wounds, and
further down the line. There's more of a risk for the things I just mentioned, like kidney damage.
Diabetes is a diagnosed based on how much glucose is in your blood.
So it would seem logical that a diet with tons of sugar must cause it, this is a more controversial
topic than you might think. There are no human studies that prove eating tons of sugar
causes type two diabetes, because it would be unethical for scientists to give people diabetes.
But there are studies showing that having a bunch of sugar in your diet can cause insulin
resistance, which remember can lead to type two diabetes. In one of those studies scientists put
volunteers on a diet where for 10 weeks, 25% of the calories in their diet came from glucose or
fructose sweetened beverages. Interestingly, they found that volunteers on the high fructose diet
had increased glucose and insulin in their blood and they were less sensitive to insulin. They
didn't see that for the high glucose diet. And it's not clear exactly why there's still
a lot of work going on to figure all this out. One thing that is very clear is that obesity
is the greatest risk factor for developing type two diabetes and sugar plays into that.
If you're eating more sugar than your body can turn into energy, that sugar will be stored
as fat and extra fat, especially fat in your abdominal cavity around a bunch of your organs
can cause inflammation. Some research has shown that inflammation makes our cells
resistant to insulin and that resistance can actually lead to more inflammation.
And that leads to more insulin resistance, which as you now know, can lead to higher and higher
levels of sugar in your blood. But a lot of sugar in a person's diet can still increase
insulin resistance. Even if the person doesn't gain weight for people with type two diabetes,
healthier eating and exercise can sometimes be enough to manage it, but more likely a doctor
will prescribe different medications to keep blood sugar at a reasonable level. There's also so much
research that's focused on preventing diabetes and its complications and even trying to reverse it.