In last week’s column, we looked at different types of diabetes—primarily type 1 and type two. I also mentioned another type of diabetes called type 1.5 or LADA, which stands for latent autoimmune diabetes. This type of diabetes is sometimes called “double diabetes,” because it presents characteristics of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. I promised to take a closer look at type 1.5 diabetes this week, but first I want to clarify a couple of things I said last week.
For some people, the idea that type 2 diabetes could be caused more by a diet high in saturated fat than by sugar may seem ridiculous. We all know that diabetes is about how the body handles sugar not fat. Diabetes occurs when the body is unable to handle sugar which then builds up to dangerous levels in the blood. A diagnosis of diabetes is made when the blood sugar level tests consistently above 126 milligrams per deciliter of blood. Type 2 diabetes is characterized by insulin resistance and beta-cell dysfunction. So what does fat have to do with it?
According to their web site, “ScienceDaily is one of the Internet’s most popular science news web sites. Since starting in 1995, the award-winning site has earned the loyalty of students, researchers, healthcare professionals, government agencies, educators and the general public around the world. Now with more than 3 million monthly visitors, ScienceDaily generates nearly 15 million page views a month and is steadily growing in its global audience.” In other words, it is a quite credible source for science news.
In this year’s April 26 edition of ScienceDaily an article ran that was titled, “Link Between High-Fat Diet and Type 2 Diabetes Clarified.” The article begins with the following statement: “A diet high in saturated fat is a key contributor to type 2 diabetes, a major health threat worldwide.”
The article goes on to quote new research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine that was published online on April 10 in the journal Nature Immunology. This new study confirms that saturated fatty acids can cause the immune cells of the body to produce an inflammatory protein, called interleukin-1beta.
Saturated fatty acids are the building blocks of fats from animal foods but not from vegetable foods. Vegetable fats are built from unsaturated fatty acids. These unsaturated fats do not cause this inflammatory protein to be produced. Only saturated animal fats cause the inflammatory protein to be made.
ScienceDaily quotes Jenny Ting, PhD in a study she co-authored. Dr. Ting states that Interleukin-1beta protein acts on tissue and organ cells of the body, such as the liver, muscle and fat cells, and turns off their response to insulin. Instead of allowing insulin to enter, the cells become insulin resistant. Because insulin acts like an usher that opens the door of the cells to sugar, and since the cells are now resistant to insulin, the result is that sugar builds up in the blood to dangerous levels. Because saturated fat is the root cause of this insulin resistance, it is clear that a diet high in saturated fat can definitely cause type 2 diabetes symptoms.
But it is not only this inflammatory protein that makes body cells insulin resistant. It is also recognized that a high saturated fat diet causes a thin coating of fat to build up on the blood-vessel walls, and also on the cells' insulin-receptor sites on the outside of the cell walls, as I mentioned last week. When this happens, it starts requiring more insulin to get the sugar from the bloodstream into these fat-coated cells. So there are at least two ways that too much saturated fat in the diet can cause type two diabetes to develop. And the good news is that if it is caught before the insulin producing beta-cells are permanently damaged in the pancreas, type 2 diabetes is 100% easily reversible as we mentioned last week.
Another type of diabetes that has been identified is being called either type 1.5 or LADA which stands for latent autoimmune diabetes. As I have already mentioned, it is sometimes called “double diabetes,” because it presents characteristics of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. In this type of diabetes, special proteins called antibodies, which are part of the immune system, begin to attack the beta cells in the pancreas which are responsible for making insulin.
Doctors stumbled on type 1.5 diabetes quite by accident back in the 1970s. They were trying to find a way of identifying unique proteins called auto antibodies that are found in the blood of people with type 1. When these proteins are found in a person’s blood, it is evidence that their body systems are being attacked by their own immune system. The doctors developed a new test for the autoantibodies. This test confirmed that type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the body’s own immune system kills off the beta cells in the pancreas. The beta cells are the makers of insulin.
As part of their study, these doctors also looked for autoantibodies in people with type 2 diabetes. To the scientists’ surprise, the autoantibody proteins showed up in about 10 percent of people diagnosed with type 2. These were type 2 diabetics whose immune systems had started destroying their ability to manufacture insulin. They were type 2 diabetics in the process of developing type 1. Therefore the term type 1.5. People with type 1.5 gradually lose their insulin-producing capability, so that they start requiring insulin within 5–10 years of diagnosis.
We have already seen that type 2 diabetes is caused by too much saturated fat in the diet. And since type 1.5 is a subcategory of type 2, it should be clear that high fat consumption is part of the cause of type 1.5 as well. But what is it that causes their immune systems to start destroying beta cells? One theory that has been presented is that the lack of breast-feeding, or weaning children off breast milk too soon, and exposing the infants to cow's milk, can increase a child’s risk of developing type 1 diabetes.
Inga Thorsdottir, PhD, Chairman of the Icelandic Nutrition Council at the Public Health Institute, co-authored a study in the year 2000, that was published in the journal, Pediatrics. This study failed to find a link between breastfeeding and cows milk consumption, possibly because of the design of the study. But these researchers acknowledged that other studies had found that “a shorter duration of breastfeeding or an earlier consumption of cow's milk in infancy” led to higher incidence of type 1 diabetes which suggests a causative relationship between cow's milk consumption and type 1 diabetes. The study also noted that cow’s milk from some countries seems to contain more diabetes-causing substances than milk from other countries.
Another study published in 1997 in Diabetes Spectrum analyzed a large number of selected studies on the subject and found that “children with diabetes are 60% more likely to have had an early exposure to cow's milk than nondiabetic children.”
Hertzel Gerstein, MD, MSc, the Population Health Institute Chair in Diabetes Research at McMaster University, conducted a study in 1994 called, "Cow's Milk Exposure and Type I Diabetes Mellitus: A Critical Overview of the Clinical Literature." He states that the studies he reviewed “consistently showed a relationship between type I diabetes and either cow's milk exposure or diminished breast-feeding. In the case-control studies, patients with type I diabetes were more likely to have been breast-fed for less than 3 months... and to have been exposed to cow's milk before 4 months…
CONCLUSIONS—Early cow's milk exposure may be an important determinant of subsequent type I diabetes and may increase the risk approximately 1.5 times."
If this is the case, then feeding our children with the human breast milk, as God intended, ra ther than with milk from a much larger baby animal that has little in common with humans, might help protect against both type 1 diabetes and type 1.5 diabetes later on. This begins to make more sense when we realize that mother’s milk does much more than just nourish her baby. Breast milk actually transfers the mother’s own antibodies to her baby. These antibodies are proteins that attack foreign invaders in her body and protect her from disease. So the longer a baby is breastfed, the stronger the child’s immune system becomes.
A mother-cow’s milk does the same thing for her calf. Cow’s milk contains antibodies that attack everything foreign to a cow. Now how much in a human baby is foreign to a cow? Do you see the problem? It seems that the antibodies in cow’s milk may sometimes attack beta cells in children weaned from breast milk too soon, causing type 1 diabetes. Might milk-drinking adults have an increased risk of developing type 1.5?
Until next week, be wise, be healthy and God bless!
For some people, the idea that type 2 diabetes could be caused more by a diet high in saturated fat than by sugar may seem ridiculous. We all know that diabetes is about how the body handles sugar not fat. Diabetes occurs when the body is unable to handle sugar which then builds up to dangerous levels in the blood. A diagnosis of diabetes is made when the blood sugar level tests consistently above 126 milligrams per deciliter of blood. Type 2 diabetes is characterized by insulin resistance and beta-cell dysfunction. So what does fat have to do with it?
According to their web site, “ScienceDaily is one of the Internet’s most popular science news web sites. Since starting in 1995, the award-winning site has earned the loyalty of students, researchers, healthcare professionals, government agencies, educators and the general public around the world. Now with more than 3 million monthly visitors, ScienceDaily generates nearly 15 million page views a month and is steadily growing in its global audience.” In other words, it is a quite credible source for science news.
In this year’s April 26 edition of ScienceDaily an article ran that was titled, “Link Between High-Fat Diet and Type 2 Diabetes Clarified.” The article begins with the following statement: “A diet high in saturated fat is a key contributor to type 2 diabetes, a major health threat worldwide.”
The article goes on to quote new research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine that was published online on April 10 in the journal Nature Immunology. This new study confirms that saturated fatty acids can cause the immune cells of the body to produce an inflammatory protein, called interleukin-1beta.
Saturated fatty acids are the building blocks of fats from animal foods but not from vegetable foods. Vegetable fats are built from unsaturated fatty acids. These unsaturated fats do not cause this inflammatory protein to be produced. Only saturated animal fats cause the inflammatory protein to be made.
ScienceDaily quotes Jenny Ting, PhD in a study she co-authored. Dr. Ting states that Interleukin-1beta protein acts on tissue and organ cells of the body, such as the liver, muscle and fat cells, and turns off their response to insulin. Instead of allowing insulin to enter, the cells become insulin resistant. Because insulin acts like an usher that opens the door of the cells to sugar, and since the cells are now resistant to insulin, the result is that sugar builds up in the blood to dangerous levels. Because saturated fat is the root cause of this insulin resistance, it is clear that a diet high in saturated fat can definitely cause type 2 diabetes symptoms.
But it is not only this inflammatory protein that makes body cells insulin resistant. It is also recognized that a high saturated fat diet causes a thin coating of fat to build up on the blood-vessel walls, and also on the cells' insulin-receptor sites on the outside of the cell walls, as I mentioned last week. When this happens, it starts requiring more insulin to get the sugar from the bloodstream into these fat-coated cells. So there are at least two ways that too much saturated fat in the diet can cause type two diabetes to develop. And the good news is that if it is caught before the insulin producing beta-cells are permanently damaged in the pancreas, type 2 diabetes is 100% easily reversible as we mentioned last week.
Another type of diabetes that has been identified is being called either type 1.5 or LADA which stands for latent autoimmune diabetes. As I have already mentioned, it is sometimes called “double diabetes,” because it presents characteristics of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. In this type of diabetes, special proteins called antibodies, which are part of the immune system, begin to attack the beta cells in the pancreas which are responsible for making insulin.
Doctors stumbled on type 1.5 diabetes quite by accident back in the 1970s. They were trying to find a way of identifying unique proteins called auto antibodies that are found in the blood of people with type 1. When these proteins are found in a person’s blood, it is evidence that their body systems are being attacked by their own immune system. The doctors developed a new test for the autoantibodies. This test confirmed that type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the body’s own immune system kills off the beta cells in the pancreas. The beta cells are the makers of insulin.
As part of their study, these doctors also looked for autoantibodies in people with type 2 diabetes. To the scientists’ surprise, the autoantibody proteins showed up in about 10 percent of people diagnosed with type 2. These were type 2 diabetics whose immune systems had started destroying their ability to manufacture insulin. They were type 2 diabetics in the process of developing type 1. Therefore the term type 1.5. People with type 1.5 gradually lose their insulin-producing capability, so that they start requiring insulin within 5–10 years of diagnosis.
We have already seen that type 2 diabetes is caused by too much saturated fat in the diet. And since type 1.5 is a subcategory of type 2, it should be clear that high fat consumption is part of the cause of type 1.5 as well. But what is it that causes their immune systems to start destroying beta cells? One theory that has been presented is that the lack of breast-feeding, or weaning children off breast milk too soon, and exposing the infants to cow's milk, can increase a child’s risk of developing type 1 diabetes.
Inga Thorsdottir, PhD, Chairman of the Icelandic Nutrition Council at the Public Health Institute, co-authored a study in the year 2000, that was published in the journal, Pediatrics. This study failed to find a link between breastfeeding and cows milk consumption, possibly because of the design of the study. But these researchers acknowledged that other studies had found that “a shorter duration of breastfeeding or an earlier consumption of cow's milk in infancy” led to higher incidence of type 1 diabetes which suggests a causative relationship between cow's milk consumption and type 1 diabetes. The study also noted that cow’s milk from some countries seems to contain more diabetes-causing substances than milk from other countries.
Another study published in 1997 in Diabetes Spectrum analyzed a large number of selected studies on the subject and found that “children with diabetes are 60% more likely to have had an early exposure to cow's milk than nondiabetic children.”
Hertzel Gerstein, MD, MSc, the Population Health Institute Chair in Diabetes Research at McMaster University, conducted a study in 1994 called, "Cow's Milk Exposure and Type I Diabetes Mellitus: A Critical Overview of the Clinical Literature." He states that the studies he reviewed “consistently showed a relationship between type I diabetes and either cow's milk exposure or diminished breast-feeding. In the case-control studies, patients with type I diabetes were more likely to have been breast-fed for less than 3 months... and to have been exposed to cow's milk before 4 months…
CONCLUSIONS—Early cow's milk exposure may be an important determinant of subsequent type I diabetes and may increase the risk approximately 1.5 times."
If this is the case, then feeding our children with the human breast milk, as God intended, ra ther than with milk from a much larger baby animal that has little in common with humans, might help protect against both type 1 diabetes and type 1.5 diabetes later on. This begins to make more sense when we realize that mother’s milk does much more than just nourish her baby. Breast milk actually transfers the mother’s own antibodies to her baby. These antibodies are proteins that attack foreign invaders in her body and protect her from disease. So the longer a baby is breastfed, the stronger the child’s immune system becomes.
A mother-cow’s milk does the same thing for her calf. Cow’s milk contains antibodies that attack everything foreign to a cow. Now how much in a human baby is foreign to a cow? Do you see the problem? It seems that the antibodies in cow’s milk may sometimes attack beta cells in children weaned from breast milk too soon, causing type 1 diabetes. Might milk-drinking adults have an increased risk of developing type 1.5?
Until next week, be wise, be healthy and God bless!
