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…
Whereas no one in our media-controlled world can still ignore the noxious effects of junk food on the cardiovascular system, fewer people know that our poor diet habits also endanger our liver. However, some 70 million Americans may suffer from nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), also called NAFLD (nonalcoholic fatty liver disease). NASH is a fast-spreading disease in the Western hemisphere, and…
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…
While type 2 diabetes is more commonly a middle-aged people’s disease, hence its former name of “adult-onset diabetes” our poor eating habits and out-of-control sweet tooth mean that nowadays younger people, and sometimes even teenagers or children, are now diagnosed with it.
The antioxidant flavonoids in green tea increase our body’s sensitivity to insulin, which makes this beverage a potent ally for prediabetes and type 2 diabetes sufferers.
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…
