An Example of the Control We Have Over Type 2 Diabetes
Type 2 diabetes is a self-inflicted medical condition for the vast majority of sufferers. You get it by consistently eating too much and accumulating a large amount of visceral fat tissue, thereby suffering all of the unpleasant metabolic consequences that it brings. The more you do this, the greater your risk. The path to diabetes is a gradual increase in metabolic disarray that first passes through what is known as metabolic syndrome before becoming full blown diabetes. Some people are susceptible than others as a result of genetic differences, but the road is basically the same for everyone: eating yourself into sickness takes years of effort, but in a wealthy society nearly everyone has the resources to do it.
Here is the interesting thing: at almost any point along the way, right up until either morbid obesity or later stage diabetes, this can all be reversed. A person can step off the path of increasing disability and head back to a healthier lifestyle, turning back the progression of diabetes. This can even be accomplished in a fairly drastic way by enlisting calorie restriction:
An extreme eight-week diet of 600 calories a day can reverse Type 2 diabetes in people newly diagnosed with the disease .... the low-calorie diet reduced fat levels in the pancreas and liver, which helped insulin production return to normal. Seven out of 11 people studied were free of diabetes three months later.
Not that I'm suggesting that it's smart to eat gluttonously for half your life and then rely on having your fat pulled from the fire this way - there are other consequences to being overweight for an extended period of time, as shown by risk levels of suffering age-related diseases in later life. But here is another more recent study to illustrate the point that cutting back and changing lifestyle is very powerful when it comes to diabetes, as it restores some of the brain's activity with respect to food that becomes disarrayed in diabetics.
The hypothalamus is critically involved in the regulation of feeding. Previous studies have shown that glucose ingestion inhibits hypothalamic neuronal activity. However, this was not observed in patients with type 2 diabetes. Restoring the energy balance by reduction of the caloric intake and weight loss are important therapeutic strategies in patients with type 2 diabetes. We hypothesized that caloric restriction would have beneficial effects on the hypothalamic neuronal response to glucose ingestion.Functional magnetic resonance imaging was performed in 10 male type 2 diabetic patients before and after a 4-day very low calorie diet (VLCD) [to measure] neuronal activity in the hypothalamus in response to an oral glucose load.
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Post-VLCD scans showed a prolonged signal decrease after glucose ingestion. The results of the current study demonstrate that short-term caloric restriction readily normalizes hypothalamic responsiveness to glucose ingestion in patients with type 2 diabetes.