What are the causes of diabetes?

You might ask yourself, why do I have diabetes? Have I done something wrong? The answer is no. We know that the vast majority of the tendency to diabetes is genetically transmitted. If you are obese, your chances of developing diabetes are much higher than if you are not obese but by the same token we know that obesity has many genetic causes as well. Therefore, rather than blame yourself for where you are at, it is better to think of what can do to control your diabetes and make your health better.

Type 2 diabetes is determined principally by a genetic factor, that is, what is your heredity? If you have the gene(s) for diabetes, you may or may not actually develop the disease because to develop the disease usually something else has to happen. That something else would be, for example, if you allow yourself to become obese, if you do not do regular exercise or just with increasing age, the chance of you getting Type 2 diabetes becomes much greater.
It is the combination of having the genes and then having something that makes it appear. Other factors that make it appear are, the development of what is called “Insulin Resistance”. Insulin is the hormone that allows blood sugar to enter into the cells of the body and provide energy for the cells. Blood sugar has to get into the cell and insulin is the hormone that allows that to happen. In people who have genetic Type 2 diabetes there is a resistance to the action of insulin. In other words, prior to diabetes one molecule of insulin would bring in one molecule of sugar. However, in people who have early diabetes, they need two or three molecules of insulin to get that same amount of sugar into the bloodstream. As a result, early on in the development of diabetes, they develop insulin resistance and can actually have high levels of insulin but the insulin is not working well, and they need more and more insulin, to get same amount of energy (sugar) into the cells of the body.

 

You noticed that before the blood sugar rises, it can stay very normal for a long period of time. However, as you can see the top line of the chart, the insulin resistance is getting worse and worse. And as the insulin resistance gets worse, the body responds by pouring out more and more insulin to try and do the same amount of work. So insulin resistance increases in the top line, your amount of insulin secretion increases as you see the next line down, but the blood sugar still stays low. However, at a certain point in life and it varies in each individual, the pancreas starts to fail. It just cannot keep producing the amount of insulin that you need to hold the sugar down. When that happens you become overtly diabetic, that means that the blood sugar now is not controllable any longer. And as you see from this diagram, the insulin level starts to fall and the blood sugar then starts to rise. Now we have clear cut diabetes which was present probably for several years before that but you were able to control it as you had increased insulin secretion. Now you have developed Type 2 Diabetes and it is now very hard to control your blood sugars. It can be made easier, however, by eating the right foods or not demanding so much insulin when we eat a meal. The demand for insulin depends upon how much and what type of carbohydrates we ingest.