Tag : type-ii

When it comes to health, people often say, “Genetics is destiny.” In other words, you were born pre-wired for the condition of your health today. Is that true? Well – yes and no.

When I was a lad in medicine, the great debate was over "Nature vs. Nurture."  We were taught the prevailing wisdom that there were aspects of our lives that were determined by our genetic code and others that were a function of our environment.  The debate concerned which factors fell into which category.  Based on the medical knowledge we have today, it turns out that much of the intellectual and emotional energy of that debate was wasted.  Now we know that a great deal of what we call “our genetic predisposition” is dramatically influenced by our environment. In other words, Nature is significantly affected by Nurture.

Of course, this doesn’t mean your genes actually change.  They were fixed when the egg and sperm provided by your parents first came together

Since I stopped practicing general family medicine and started dedicating myself exclusively to aging issues, there is one disease process that comes up again and again.  It’s the one on which I probably spend the lion’s share of my time as a clinical physician. That process is adult-onset, or Type II, diabetes. No mistake about it, it’s a killer and in America’s adult population, it’s a full blown epidemic. 

People worry a great deal about cancer, but your chances of getting cancer pale beside the one-in-three shot you have of developing diabetes before you die. People tend to overlook diabetes since the disease has been manageable for decades. But managed or not, over the long term it will still ravage your heart, eyes, and circulatory system. 

The thing that’s so crazy about diabetes is that we still have a tendency to view and treat adult-onset diabetes as a purely genetic disorder. The truth is, however, diabetes is like heart disease