Health
Sugar, Fat, and
Type 2 Diabetes
ESSENTIAL Naples
What Should You Believe?
SPRING 2022
16
By Denise A. Pancyrz
“Don’t set the unrealistic goal that you need to reverse your diabetes in 30 days—although you may see great results in the short term, those results likely will not last. Your goal should be longterm results.” —Denise A. Pancyrz
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ype 2 diabetes can be a confusing disease in terms of causes and treatments. For example, patients may be told sugar has caused diabetes and therefore, avoiding sugar is the fix for their diabetes. Additionally, there has been much talk about obesity putting people on a direct path to diabetes. Decades of consuming processed food, fast food, and sugary beverages have contributed to the obesity epidemic. Within the last five decades, obesity rates have more than doubled: in 1970, the obesity rate of adults in the U.S was 15%. Currently, 42.4% of adults are obese.
turned into fat and ends up in organs not designed for fat storage, such as the liver and pancreas. Low-glycemic diets have touted reversing diabetes as well. Followers of low-glycemic diets ditched the carbs, assuming all other food items were healthy to consume, which resulted in many of those “dieters” turning to unhealthy fats to fill the gap of missing carbohydrates. Furthermore, years of yo-yo dieting can increase your body fat percentage, causing fatty liver, high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease. And when you tire of “starving” yourself you may return to those unhealthy lifestyle habits, making matters worse. Eating unhealthy foods and following fad diets very often results in inflammation, which What Is Really Causing causes insulin resistance—the precursor to type Type 2 Diabetes? 2 diabetes. Chronic inflammation also increases Sugar is indirectly involved in the lead up to type your risk of high blood pressure and heart disease 2 diabetes. The ingredients in processed food contain unhealthy fats and are laden with sugar or and results in damage to healthy cells, and also refined carbohydrates, which quickly break down interferes with the metabolic functions of fat into sugar once they are in your system. When the tissue—you may have trouble converting carbohydrates into energy and your fat and muscle cells body has more food than it needs, the excess is
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