Type 2 diabetes appeared in the beginning of the 20th century, when sugar ceased to be a rare commodity to come and grace every kitchen table. Before that, the Old World relied on honey or beet sugar for sweetening. And, as the near lack of sweet recipes in the great culinary treaties of the Middles Ages shows, desserts as we…
Man originally was a hunter-gatherer and our organism is therefore designed to profit as much as possible from periods of abundance in anticipation of unavoidable food shortages. As long as the vast majority of mankind remained chronically underfed, this wasn’t a problem. Fat people were oddities – King Henry VIII of England, rotund Chinese mandarins and adipose oriental potentates spring…
In most mammals, including humans, the perception and the appreciation of sweet taste (as opposed to other tastes: salty, bitter, spicy, etc.) is an innate capacity. It depends on receptors located on the tongue. The stimulation of these receptors by sweet-tasting foods or beverages generates a sensation that most of us find intensely pleasurable. Nothing wrong with that, except that…
Nowadays, two approaches of diabetes, prediabetes, and other metabolic imbalances prevail. The first one, the ‘all-medical’ approach, chiefly deals with endocrine and metabolic processes: calorie intake, insulin metabolism, enzymatic processes and all the neurotransmitters involved in homeostasis, i.e. the regulation of our blood sugar level. It promotes a treatment aiming to ‘chemically’ restore these mechanisms. The second – and most…
According to the 2010 OECD report “Obesity and the Economics of Prevention: Fit not Fat”, at least 50% of the adult population is now overweight (as defined by the World Health Organization as having a body mass index, or BMI, of 25 kg/m² or above) in more than half of the 34 OECD countries, and 500 million people worldwide – 10%…
Close to 90 million American people suffer from prediabetes, and 70% of those shall sooner or later develop Type 2 diabetes… And while this pandemic is undoubtedly linked to modern Western lifestyle habits, it nevertheless affects most countries nowadays. Indeed, if nothing changes, within 20 years Type 2 diabetes will most certainly rank first among human diseases (according to the…
Type 2 diabetes is an incurable disease, and when left untreated, often leads to dire and severely incapacitating complications. There are several types of complications: Arterial complications: Macro-vascular disease (macro-angiopathy) hits the coronary arteries with a risk of myocardial infarction, the brain arteries with a risk of stroke and the arteries of the leg with a risk of obliterating arteritis.…
Statistics prove that close relatives of diabetic patients are more likely to develop this metabolic disease. And the likelihood of becoming diabetic increases along with the number of relatives affected (one grandparent, one parent, both parents, the whole family). But is this caused by genetics or by the fact that members of a family usually share common diet and lifestyle…
Dietary fats are usually classified according to their chemical composition. Almost all the lipids in our diet or adipocytes are triglycerides made of a glycerol molecule linked with three fatty acids in an ‘E’-shaped structure (hence their name). As for the fatty acids, they combine oxygen atoms, a chain of carbon atoms of variable length and hydrogen atoms (two maximum).…
