To learn more about programs Herd Healthcare offers, our website is:
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Type 1 And Type 2 Diabetes Are Different

Type 1 diabetes is uncommon. It signals that the immune system is not working properly. Mother or father with type 1 diabetes means their children will have about 10 times the normal risk. That is, they have about 10% chance of type 1 diabetes. Both mother and father with type 1 diabetes doubles risk to 20 times normal with 20% chance.

Type 2 diabetes is much more common. Mother or father with type 2 diabetes means their children have twice the normal risk. About 50% chance if they’re overweight, 80% chance if they’re obese. Both mother and father with type 2 diabetes makes risk almost certain unless body weight and abdominal obesity are kept normal.

Advance Warning System For Type 2 Diabetes

Knowing there’s a family history is a real advantage. It’s advance warning.

Type 2 diabetes is not inherited. What’s inherited is a low threshold for insulin resistance. Energy management is simply overwhelmed by overeating. Skeletal muscle and liver are using and storing all they can handle. Their cells reject further inward transport of excess sugar and fat.

What is overeating? It’s consuming food containing more energy than required for resting metabolic rate and active physical work. An excess even more than can be stored in muscle, liver or fat tissue.

Family History of type 2 diabetes proves a potentially low threshold for insulin resistance to overeating. Usually insulin resistance increases along with overweight and obesity.

Some people who eat more than they need don’t trigger insulin resistance. They just become overweight and obese. They eventually have heart disease, stroke, cancer or dementia but they don’t get diabetes.

Avoid overweight and abdominal obesity to avoid abnormal threshold for insulin resistance.

Not enough skeletal muscle to store energy is just as bad as too much body fat. Loss of skeletal muscle can cause insulin resistance when there’s been a long time with little physical activity.

Setting The Threshold For Insulin Resistance

Most of that low threshold is set by the parents overeating before their children are born. After birth, the response to overeating continues to form during childhood, adolescence and adult maturity.

As shown in the Figure, by the time children are 5 years old, 10 to 15% of them have become obese. At 11 years of age, 15 to 20% have developed obesity. By 19 years old, about 20% have become obese.

Among those obese children, any who have a family history of type 2 diabetes have an 80% likelihood of developing diabetes. Any children not overweight would have only about a 5% chance of developing type 2 diabetes.

The future for your family’s history can be changed. If you have children already, help them avoid diabetes before they have children. If they already have children, help them teach your grandchildren to avoid diabetes before they have children.

If you have a Family History of type 2 diabetes you have twice the likelihood of developing Type 2 diabetes. If you don’t have a Family History but you have diabetes then you are the one who starts the history for children and grandchildren.

If you have a Family History of type 2 diabetes, avoid overweight and abdominal obesity and maintain a routine of regular exercise. You’ll escape having diabetes yourself.

What if you don’t have a Family History of type 2 diabetes but you have diabetes yourself? Then you have the opportunity to change your family’s history. Corrections you make to reverse your diabetes will save good health for your children and grandchildren.

Avoiding Type 2 Diabetes

Obesity is becoming more and more common in adults and in children. As shown in the Figure, during the past 20 years, the prevalence of obesity in adults has increased from 30% to 40%. During the same time, the prevalence of obesity in children has increased from 14% to almost 20%.

The increase in obesity in both adults and children has resulted in an increase in type 2 diabetes. About 10% of obese adults have type 2 diabetes and about 10% of obese children also have type 2 diabetes.

In the past, most all cases diagnosed in children were type 1 diabetes. Now, approximately half are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. The relative increase appears to be related to the increased prevalence of obesity in children.

If you have a Family History of type 2 diabetes, how do you and your family avoid diabetes? By controlling fat stored inside the abdomen and maintaining physical activity!

You can control these physical features. Your maximal waist circumference should be no more than half your standing height. About 40 inches for a man and 35 inches for a woman. Your physical activity should include 150 minutes of moderate exercise every week with at least 2 sessions of resistance strength training.

If your task is to reverse type 2 diabetes, your maximum waist circumference should be less than 35 inches for a man or a woman. Physical activity every week should include 3 sessions of strength training for 30 minutes.

Family History Starts With The Children

Paying attention and making measurements in your children is most important! Their threshold for insulin resistance will determine their health. It’s their health that determines the future Family History of type 2 diabetes.

As children run, jump and play, they build and strengthen their skeletal muscles. Exercising muscles while playing uses energy from food they’ve eaten. Turning energy into muscle and using muscle for physical work prevents storing excess energy in body fat.

How much is too much body fat and what is too little physical fitness?

Size, shape and development keep changing as children get older. Fortunately critical features of physical growth and physical fitness can be combined in one metric.

Maximum waist circumference for boys and girls at all ages should be less than half their body height.

Family Acting All Together

The personal bonds within a family bring extraordinary opportunities to create a good future Family History.

The power of bonding strengthens trust and spreads enjoyment of personal achievement. Communication across distance and contact in family events together are great opportunities. Sharing makes it possible for all to take pride in success and pleasure from reversing diabetes. Family provides support and motivation for persistence when progress seems difficult.

Family Day for Diabetes must be every day. World Health is important. It starts at home with each of us. We share experience, support each other and enjoy good health together as Family.

Summary

Type 2 diabetes results from low tolerance for excess energy from food not used for resting metabolism and active physical work. Initially, the excess is stored in fat and that causes overweight and obesity.

If excess energy to be stored becomes more than skeletal muscle, liver and fat can handle, sugar and fat are not cleared normally from circulating blood. In response, the pancreas secretes more and more insulin as levels of sugar and fat continue to rise. The failure of insulin to transport excess sugar and fat into skeletal muscle, liver, fat and other organs is called “insulin resistance.”

Some people who eat more than they need don’t trigger insulin resistance. They just become overweight and obese. They eventually have heart disease, stroke, cancer or dementia but they don’t get diabetes.

In others, the excess eventually becomes more than can be stored and causes type 2 diabetes.

Family History of Type 2 diabetes is a strong advance warning for children and young adults in that family. Low threshold for insulin resistance is partly inherited at birth and partly learned by overeating as children grow and mature in their family.

Avoid overweight and abdominal obesity and maintain a routine of regular exercise to avoid or reverse any abnormal threshold for insulin resistance.

Let us help you avoid or reverse any predisposition for type 2 diabetes in your family.

We are pleased to share our blog articles with you, and we are always interested to hear from our readers. Our website address is:

www.herdhealthcare.com

The Good News is that Type 2 Diabetes in your Family History still can be Prevented or Reversed! Even twins, identical at birth develop differently!

You can protect yourself and your children. There’s no need to let Family History tell the story for your children.

To learn more about the programs Herd Healthcare offers, our website is:
www.herdhealthcare.com

What’s In Your Genes?

A gene is the basic unit of heredity. Almost all cells have exactly the same genes and almost all people have the same genes. Fewer than 1% of the total number of genes are slightly different between people.

Genes are the firmware running in every cell. They vary in size from several hundred DNA units to more than 2M. The total number of genes estimated in the Human Genome Project is 20K to 25K. Not all genes are critical to normal function. Possibly 3,000 are active.

Each gene has two copies, one from each parent. Small variations between people in DNA structure of each gene make unique physical features.

From a single cell, human structure develops into hundreds of cell types. This development process works through chemical tags which switch genes on and off. These chemical tags are the software running each cell. The specific sets of switches turned off and on determine the nature of each cell and how it functions.

All cells in the body have identical genomes. However, each cell has a unique set of epigenetic instructions. Epigenetic settings of each cell direct the expression of genes controlling cell function. This serves as a chemical memory of function in early life and causes long-term expression of gene function. The reversibility of chemical tags controlling gene expression balances the durability of chemical memory. The result is gradual change from function recorded earlier in life.

Epigenomes are unique sets of instructions running each cell. They affect gene expression, active or inactive, without changing gene structure. They are changing constantly according to physical, mental, emotional and environmental conditions. They are inherited at any particular time in whatever state each epigenome is running.

Family History

If nothing changes, a combination of Family History and Overweight/Obesity is the strongest predictor of Type 2 Diabetes.

A population sample of 3,140 men and women in Framingham, MA had a 2-hour oral glucose tolerance test after an overnight fast. Those who already had Type 2 diabetes were excluded from further study. During the next 7 years, there were 160 new cases of Type 2 Diabetes diagnosed. The simple clinical prediction model of Parental History and Overweight/Obesity accounted for approximately 85% of all new cases.

The Human Genome Project opened up the opportunity to check the power of using fixed genome structure to predict Type 2 Diabetes.

A large Swedish study examined 15,000 men and women with a median follow-up period of 24.8 years. A total of 11 of the most powerful individual genes were tested to predict future development of Type 2 Diabetes. The odds ratio for each variant of gene ranged from 1.07 to 1.30. In comparison, the odds ratio was 1.67 for Family History plus more than 2.0 for Overweight/Obesity. Common genetic variants associated with diabetes had a small effect in comparison to simple clinical risk factors.

Apparently, the increased risk of Family History for Type 2 Diabetes is the result of shared environment and learned health behavior. However, the effects of epigenetic settings determining health behavior can be inherited.

Developmental Programming

Human development includes adjusting to changes in the environment.

Intrauterine conditions establish adjustments in prenatal function. These early epigenomic adjustments enhance fetal and postnatal health. They also influence physical development, physiological function and behavior throughout postnatal life.

Lifetime epigenetic adjustments continue to affect responses to environment and behavior. Apparently identical conditions create remarkably different features.

Identical twins show how epigenetic differences arise during life. Monozygotic twins share a common genotype. Although they are indistinguishable during early years of life, differences appear as they get older.

Studies of 80 pairs of identical twins have been reported from Spain. Their ages ranged from 3 to 74 years. In all pairs, there was significant difference between epigenetic function. The figures illustrate differences in typical epigenetic structure and gene expression between 3-year-old twins and twins who were 50 years old. Furthermore, differences in all pairs were greater in older pairs than in pairs of younger ages.

These data illustrate that differences in environment and behavior cause different epigenetic adjustments. As a result, even identical twins develop differences in function and different susceptibilities to disease.

Physical Activity

Type 2 Diabetes develops when excess calories overload storage capacity of glucose in skeletal muscle, liver and fat tissue. Chronic aerobic exercise promotes metabolic efficiency, oxygen utilization, contractile activity and cell growth of skeletal muscle. Muscle biopsies of healthy subjects before and after exercise interventions showed improvement in expression of gene function.

Biopsies of adipose tissue also showed improved storage of glucose and fatty acids in response to exercise training.

Neurodegenerative disease and cognition have been improved by aerobic exercise and strength training. Exercise releases substances from muscle, fat and liver that aid neurogenesis, neuron maturation and brain vascularization. These beneficial effects indicate  modulation of gene expression.

Obesity

Early-life experience is the origin of adult health and disease. Obese mothers are more likely to have obese children. Epigenetic programming during years of development is likely to cause gene expression that enhances obesity in later life.

Throughout adult life, creation of adipose tissue is controlled by epigenetic factors. The successful creation of new fat stores blunts the appearance of high levels of sugar and fatty acids in the blood. Failure to clear these substances from the circulation results in sustained high levels of insulin. The combination of high levels of sugar and fatty acids with high levels of insulin results in damage to eyes, nerves and kidneys.

Eventually, sustained high levels of insulin, sugar and fatty acids in the circulation cause heart disease, stroke, cancer and dementia.

Epigenetic Inheritance Across Generations

Inheritance of epigenetic factors deserves special attention. Chemical tags controlling gene expression ties genes which are totally inherited to the transient functions that can change during life from generation to generation.

Epigenetics from both mother and father influence their offspring. Maternal influence includes not only adult epigenetics transferred to ovum but also conditions encountered by embryo in utero. Paternal epigenetics transferred into sperm are carried into embryo for its development after birth. Good health habits creating good epigenetics for offspring are essential to a strategy for Good Family History.

We are pleased to share our blog articles with you, and we are always interested to hear from our readers. Our website address is: www.herdhealthcare.com