The FastDay Forum

This is an interesting review of a much more academic book that raises some questions about the evolutionary causes of diabetes.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/ind ... more-25640

[carorees]

The problem with this review is that it's hard to get a feel for how the hypotheses outlined were derived. It seems to be saying that type 2 diabetes is an evolutionary development. Now evolution tends to result in detrimental mutations working their way out of the population so the book is saying there is some advantage to the insulin resistant phenotype, presumably this advantage occurs before reproduction has taken place and then the fact that later on it results in lots of problems does not impact on reproductive ability so doesn't matter as far as evolution goes.

So, I guess it's an interesting theory but for people who develop diabetes, it's not much help unless the book goes on to say how one can prompt a change to the alternative phenotype.

Yes it doesn't give much information about that & I guess because the book is so expensive only academics will buy it. My OH was interested because he has familial Type 2 diabetes & if it isn't only diet or obesity driven at least some other causation factors may now be considered? not much help for the management of it but we found it interesting.