The medical industry is quick to rely on what they have been told in/re cause of diabetes. There is no empirical evidence to draw on. So does obesity cause diabetes or is it just an early manifestation of it? Is there a yet to be discovered agent of transmission that makes diabetes communicable?
My personal opinion? I think that being sedentary brings it all on, but some people are more genetically prone to developing problems than others.
50 years ago there weren't so many desk jobs, OSHA wasn't making sure that anybody could do virtually every job in America safely and with no particular need of being physical, things weren't so easy -- so convenient. People actually had to get up and DO things.
And when diabetes did crop up? It was in retirees....people who were no longer physically active like they used to be.
Add to all of that the trend toward eating out, even if you're eating at Subway it's still not as good as actually making a well rounded meal. There weren't ten aisles at the grocery store dedicated almost solely to various junk foods. Soda was a treat, not something that people drank exclusively of almost anything else except coffee. Toddlers and children weren't handed bottle after bottle, cup after cup of apple juice, grape juice, variety fruit juices that our bodies were never meant to have in such quantities....they weren't given cookies to teethe on and Happy Meals three times a week.
So as a nation, our eating habits have gone right into the toilet and at the same time we've stopped moving. If you need to go to the corner store that's about a mile away do you even consider walking or riding a bike? Or do you hop in the car and go? MOST people hop in their car and go.
So we overwork the systems in our bodies whose job it is to deal with all of that. Those systems are being given a lifetime of bad behavior in the first twenty years....and there is only so much mileage that you're going to get out of your pancreas and liver and thyroid and whatever. So when you overwork it all, it just wears out faster and starts to malfunction.
Kind of like buying a nice new car and putting 100,000 miles on it in one year and never changing the oil. It may still run at the end of that year, but very few models are going to run like most year old cars do, the ones with 12,000 miles on them.
Diabetes isn't communicable in any case, unless you deem the act of giving your child too much fast food, causing him to have diabetes, as communicable.
Obesity will inevitably cause diabetes, but it's not an early manifestation, it will only cause diabetes.
Obesity will inevitably cause diabetes, but it's not an early manifestation, it will only cause diabetes.
If it were true that obesity caused diabetes, in and of itself, then all obese people would have diabetes -- and that is not the case. It would also hold true that thin, physically fit people would not get Type 2 diabetes -- also very much not true. Diabetes is a genetic disease -- it can be brought on by excess weight and sedentary lifestyle but ONLY IF YOU HAVE THE GENES FOR IT.
If you don't have the gene for it you can weigh 400 pounds and have perfectly good blood glucose ranges, not diabetic, not pre-diabetic, not insulin resistant.
However, I do believe that people can have the gene for diabetes and never fully develop it or hold it off until much later in life if they eat well and excercise and don't weigh 400 pounds.
I was raised along with my brother and sister...and while we all lived with the same diet...and even though I was the active, athletic one, I was still the one with the weight problem while the two of them are both stick skinny, as are our parents. Now as an adult I have diabetes t2 and I have fought my weight my entire life. I really don't know that weight caused it, but it sure looks like there is something else going on. I take after one parent while they take after the other. I take after the side of the family that has a history of diabetes.
This is an interesting topic. I have three brothers. Two of them aren't diabetic, but me and one of my brothers are. All my brothers were sticks while growing up and I was pudgy. I wasn't fat and I exercised all the time (swimming lots of laps and riding bicycle everyday)..I was just pudgy. It wasn't until a few years ago (he was in his 40's and I in my upper 30's) that both this brother and I were dx as type 2. I think it has to do with heredity. He is extrememly active and stick thin...I am a little active and pudgy...
__________________ DX 1994-told to lose weight by GYN,Suffered 12 years before seeking treatments: REDX 2006 by a family doc sent to endo July 31, 2006 and glad I went; Byetta, 2000mg Metformin, 28 units of levemir, fish oil, 1000mg calcium. Type 2 diabetic and high cholesterol dx March 05, psoriasis dx 1992. Married 20 yrs 2 kids: girl 19 yrs old and boy 17 yrs old.
No trite answers please. If obesity is an early manifestation of the disease, you would not expect diagnosis to have been made when the symptom comes to the fore. Cite the data not the traditional cant please, no progress in that.
davidlee -- if the medical community had actual provable answers to your question it would be wonderful, but the reality of it is that right now even research scientists are struggling to answer wither diabetes causes obesity or obesity brings on early diabetes in people genetically predisposed to it.
Traditional thinking is that the extra weight some of us carry around brings on the diabetes earlier than we'd otherwise have gotten it. But lately some researchers are beginning to think and study whether the extra weight is just an early manifestation of the disease. More specifically, the difficulty that we have losing weight coupled with the ease of gaining it....not the weight itself.
I have a diabetes group that I do research for and dig up educational materials for over on SparkPeople....I don't have the energy to do it for here, too.
Is obesity an early symptom of type II diabetes? 
