What Your Parents Ate Before You Were Born Might Affect Your Risk Of Obesity And Diabetes

What Your Parents Ate Before You Were Born Might Affect Your Risk of Obesity And Diabetes

It's well-known that the food your parents eat and the kind of kitchen they run when you're growing up can have a major impact on how your own dietary health pans out, but what about their eating habits before you were even born?
New research in mice has found that the food parents eat before their offspring come into the world can also end up affecting the next generation's health. In the study, researchers found that mice fed a high-fat diet rendered their offspring more susceptible to developing obesity and diabetes – even when the babies were carried by and born to healthy surrogate mothers, ruling out the impact of any subsequent behaviour on the part of the biological parents during pregnancy and thereafter.
The study provides the latest evidence of epigenetics – the remarkable and somewhat counterintuitive science that explains how we can inherit some traits via external or environmental factors in addition to the genetic information encoded in our DNA.
"From the perspective of basic research, this study is so important because it proves for the first time that an acquired metabolic disorder can be passed on epigenetically to the offspring via oocytes and sperm," said researcher Johannes Beckers from the German Research Centre for Environmental Health.
To isolate whether parental diets in themselves could affect offspring health outside of a behavioural context, the researchers fed groups of genetically identical mice one of three diets: high fat, low fat, or standard lab chow. After six weeks, the mice on high-fat food had become obese and showed an impaired tol Continue reading

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What Is Type 1 Diabetes?

In this section, we will share an easy-to-understand overview of type 1 diabetes, including what it is, diagnosis, treatment and links for learning more.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. For unknown reasons, the immune system attacks the insulin producing cells in the pancreas called beta cells and destroys them. You can think of insulin as the key that unlocks your cells and enables them to access sugar. Without access to sugar, it builds up in your blood. You feel tired, your body turns to fat for energy and you lose weight, and you urinate frequently as your body tries to flush out all that excess sugar.
Every human (well, all mammals, actually) need insulin to live. Everyone with diabetes needs to take some form in insulin in order to survive. Unfortunately, at this time, type 1 diabetes can’t be prevented or cured.
You may have heard type 1 diabetes called juvenile diabetes. About half of people with type 1 diabetes are diagnosed in childhood, though the truth is that type 1 diabetes can develop at any age. This terminology has long since been abandoned. (See: How Many People Have Diabetes?)
If left untreated, type 1 diabetes will eventually be fatal.
How Do You Treat Type 1 Diabetes?
Everyone with type 1 diabetes needs to take insulin to live. Insulin can come from insulin injections, insulin pump or inhaling insulin. Experimental treatments are using implanted insulin-producing cells.
The primary challenge of type 1 diabetes is to take enough insulin to lower the high blood sugars but not so much that you have severe low blood sugars. This typically requir Continue reading

Understanding the Honeymoon Phase in Type 1 Diabetes

WRITTEN BY: Forester McClatchey
A terrible illness struck me a few months after my diagnosis. The story is fairly complicated, but here are the essential elements: I participated in a Phase II Clinical Trial for a drug that was supposed to make diabetic life easier; the drug made me sick; a flurry of illnesses followed; I ended up with mono.
During those bed-ridden days, my fever climbed to 105 degrees Fahrenheit and my grip on reality became weak. I don’t think I actually hallucinated, but it makes a better story to say that I did. So, I hallucinated. The most interesting part of the experience, however, was the fact that my blood sugars stayed almost-perfect the whole time.
This fact contradicted the diabetic wisdom that states that sickness and fever will drive one’s blood sugars into the stratosphere. I never bolused for what little food I could manage, and still my levels hovered around 140. Hardly any insulin entered my body. Was I hallucinating? No: I was in the Honeymoon Phase.
The Honeymoon Phase, or “Honeymoon Period,” which can last for as long as a year, occurs when the body makes a partial recovery from its autoimmune attack. If you want to approach a thorough comprehension of T1D, or if you know anyone who was diagnosed recently, it’s important to understand what’s going on here.
But in order to understand the Honeymoon Phase, we must take a look at T1D’s pathogenesis, or, how the disease develops. Side note: I will give one whole dollar to anyone who can use “pathogenesis” in a Scrabble game.
As you probably know, Type I diabetes strikes whe Continue reading

Type 2 diabetes becoming a childhood epidemic | Miami Herald

Before, the only people diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes were older adults. However, times have changed. In the past 20 years, new cases of Type 2 diabetes in childhood have increased from less than 5 percent to more than 20 percent of all new diagnoses. What is causing this disturbing trend? What is Type 2 diabetes, and how can we protect our children from this disease?
Type 2 diabetes is the form of diabetes in which the body is resistant to the action of insulin. Insulin levels rise, and when the body can no longer make enough insulin, blood sugars rise. This is different from Type 1 diabetes, in which the body stops making insulin.
Although Type 1 diabetes is still more common among children, Type 2 diabetes — previously called adult onset or non-insulin-dependent diabetes — is becoming more common among adolescents and even younger children. Type 2 diabetes occurs in children as young as 6, and is increasing at an alarming rate, primarily due to the epidemic of obesity in children and adolescents.
Type 2 diabetes is also more common among some ethnic groups, such as African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans. Another risk factor is a family history of Type 2 diabetes or if diabetes occurred in the mother during pregnancy.
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There are a number signs parents should watch for if they suspect their child has diabetes, including:
▪ Frequent urination or new bed-wetting.
▪ Increased thirst and appetite.
▪ Decreased energy.
▪ Unexplained weigh Continue reading

Imbalance Of Gut Bacteria Linked To Elevated Risk For Diabetes

New data from researchers at the University of Copenhagen provides stronger evidence linking certain bacteria that populate our intestinal tract with a higher risk for developing insulin resistance, ultimately a precursor to developing diabetes.
The research was published in the journal Nature late last week, suggesting that the gut microbiome might be a potential target for therapeutic intervention in this ravaging disease.
Insulin resistance is a condition whereby the body still produces insulin, but is not able to utilize it effectively. When someone develops insulin resistance, glucose accumulates in the bloodstream rather than being absorbed by the cells in the body, ultimately leading to prediabetes or to type 2 diabetes.
After extensively studying a population’s gut microbial composition to identify specific compounds (branched-chain amino acids, BCAA) that ultimately led to insulin resistance from the action of specific bacteria, the researchers then extracted the causative bacteria and fed them to mice who were devoid of any bacterial flora (sham mice) to prove that the action of the bacteria on the gut flora was truly the cause of insulin resistance.
" We show that specific imbalances in the gut microbiota are essential contributors to insulin resistance , a forerunner state of widespread disorders like type 2 diabetes, hypertension and atherosclerotic cardiovascular diseases, which are in epidemic growth," said Professor Oluf Pedersen, Metabolism Center, University of Copenhagen, and senior lead author of the research.
The researchers from the University of Cop Continue reading