Diabetes

"Diabetes is becoming a crisis. The crisis. It's big, it's scary, it's growing and it's very, very expensive.
It's clearly an epidemic, and it could bring the health service to its knees. Something really does need
to happen."

Baroness Young , Chief Executive of Diabetes UK Around the world.

On the 10th of October 2011 , the British newspaper “The Guardian” published an article inwhich
the above claim was made.
Some months before , on the 27th of June 2011, the New Zealander newspaper “Haweke’s Bay
Today” published the alarming results of a study carried out by an international team of researches
working with WHO (World Health Organisation) , which found that New Zealand is among the top
five countries in the world where the percentage of people affected bydiabetes is the highest.

But what exactly is diabetes type 2 and when happens?

Our preference for sweet foods like cherries to savoury ones like cabbage is a result of an ancient
and still on-going coevolution between plants and us, animals. Fruits provide us with a pre-packaged,
tasty source of energy, while plants that bear them get to spread their seed when we spit them out,
toplaces where without our help would be impossible for them to reach.

Back in the days before 24-hour takeaway restaurants and dairies stores were all around, our
ancestors were always unsure of their next meal. So our bodies evolved to cope with
unpredictability between times of feasting and scarcity. After a meal of fruit or starchy roots like
kumara or potatoes, our stomachs break down thecarbohydrates and complex sugars, mostly into
the simple sugar glucose. When high levels of glucose are left in the bloodstream for long periods of
time circulatory problems may happen. In order to avoid that, the pancreas releases insulin. Insulin
is a hormone that stimulates cells to take up this glucose which can be converted into energy. Insulin
also causes the excess of glucose tobe stored in the liver, so when we do not have food available,
the stored glucose can be released to give us enough energy to find our next meal.

This arrangement might have suited humans centuries ago, but in the modern developed world, we
have a much more stationary lifestyle than our ancestors, which means we do not use much of the
stored glucose. Additionally, companies that makeprocessed foods appeal to our taste buds'
evolutionary attraction to sweetness by adding extra sugar to their products.

Too much consumption of this sugary food or drink combined with lack of exercise leads to
chronically elevated blood glucose levels and the pancreas in response keeps pumping out insulin.
The body eventually builds up tolerance, as cells slowly lose their ability to respondto insulin. This
insensitivity to insulin means that the body can no longer maintain glucose levels within a desirable
range. It is at this stage when you contract this metabolic disorder known as diabetes type 2.

It exists diabetes type 1, which is caused by an autoimmune response that attacks the cells in the
pancreas that make insulin, ultimately destroying them. We will not befocusing in this essay with
diabetes type 1 but 2, nevertheless both may lead to the same circulatory problems—such as
numbness in the extremities (which may lead to infection or gangrene), vision loss, kidney damage,
and coronary artery disease—and even to death.

Is it really the situation of this metabolic disorder so alarming in New Zealand and worldwide to be
considered an epidemic?

Inepidemiology we define a disease or metabolic disorder to become an epidemic when the rate of
new cases is higher than expected in a defined population over a defined period of time.
In New Zealand according to the WHO the number of people affected by diabetes in the year 2000
was of 179000, in 2010 according to Diabetes New Zealand the number of cases raised up to
189000, and WHO...