Tag : metabolic

Thanks to modern medical advances, there are an almost unlimited number of tests doctors can administer to determine who is at the greatest risk of heart attacks, strokes and dementia. Take the simple cholesterol test, for example: today we doctors can subdivide your cholesterol into seven or eight or even nine smaller subtypes and analyze your risk of cardiovascular disease, even if you appear to have “low” or “normal” cholesterol. Physicians today can administer a battery of expensive tests for just about everything.

Most people have heard that obesity can be one of the chief causes of diabetes. But it’s equally true that diabetes can actually make you fat. So does the weight problem cause the disease, or is it the other way around? This is not really a purely academic “chicken or egg” question. To understand what’s going on we need to take a brief look at the physiology involved in becoming diabetic. When we do we discover a metabolic conundrum: body fat can increase the amount of insulin you require, while at the same time those higher levels of insulin can make you fatter.