You could be doing many of the right things to control your blood sugar like intermittent fasting, reducing the intake of carbohydrates and processed foods, and exercising ... yet you could still have diabetes, or even develop it if you don't have it already. How can this be?
Doctors and the mainstream media tell you to think of diabetes as a problem of excess carbohydrates and calories, not enough exercise, and/or being overweight, but so much more is happening in the development of diabetes.
Toxins, genetics, micronutrient status, inflammation, gut health, and other factors can play an even larger role than excess body weight and carbs and calories in your diet.
And with diabetes, the stakes are high because it is a major driver of cancer, stroke, dementia (including Alzheimer's disease), cardiovascular disease, and heart attack.
The Role of Toxins in Diabetes
One study measured the level of toxins in obese people and found that only the obese people with a high level of toxins had an increased incidence of diabetes. Those who were obese but had low levels of toxins in their bodies did not have a higher incidence of diabetes.
So according to this research, an obese person with low levels of toxins does not have a higher risk of diabetes than a normal weight person. The toxins seem to be more important than whether the person is obese or not.
This is quite a surprise, given the fact that other research has long suggested a strong connectoin between diabetes and being obese. And the reason for this is probably that most people who are obese are also high in toxins.
Obese people are likely to be high in toxins because having higher body fat tends to increase the accumulation of toxins since many toxins are fat-soluble and concentrate in fat tissues.
And a person's level of toxins also increases their tendency to gain fat mass since toxins interfere with mitochondrial function and the ability to utilize glucose, leading to high blood sugar and the conversion of excess blood sugar into fat.
Researchers often use the term "diabetogens" to refer to toxins that contribute to the development of diabetes, and the term "obesogens" to refer to toxins that contribute to obesity.
Diabetogens and obesogens are present in food (especially conventionally-grown food), most personal care products, many other household products, certain industries, and the environment in general.
Diabetes and Genetics
Another key influence on the development of diabetes is genetics, and that is no suprise. However, the only people talking about which genes matter, and how to compensate for these genes if you have them, are a few functional medicine practitioners and biohackers.
But not many of them will think to connect genes governing detoxification processes with diabetes. Nevertheless, if your body has trouble eliminating toxins, then your risk of developing diabetes increases.
There are also genes that influence how you respond to food. An example of a single gene with a large influence is PPAR-gamma (PPARG).
If you have certain variants of PPARG, you will be more prone to an inflammatory, hyperglycemic, pro-glucocorticoid (e.g. elevated cortisol) response to long-chain saturated fats, the kind found in animal foods (but not in coconut oil).
This is more of an issue when long-chain saturated fats are eaten with carbohydrate-rich foods. But if eaten as part of a low-carbohydrate meal, then long-chain saturated fats will present much less of a problem for people with these variants of the PPARG gene.
So although there is nothing inherently unhealthy about long-chain saturated fats, and they have some beneficial attributes for many people, for other people these fats are a risk factor, especially in the context of a carbohydrate-rich diet.
It's important to keep in mind that before the industrialization of the food supply and the skyrocketing consumption of processed carbohydrates, combined with sedentary lifestyles, diabetes was rare, yet these genetic variants were not. Many people had these vulnerabilities, but they did not develop diabetes very often.
So the genes are not the issue so much as the context of modern civilization and evolutionarily-mismatched diets and lifestyles. By the way, if you don't believe in evolution, substitute "ancestrally-mismatched", "genetically-mismatched", or "metabolically-mismatched".
Micronutrient Status
Most health-conscious people are aware that the development of diabetes is heavily influenced by micronutrient status, your levels of vitamins and minerals.
And many people are aware that the minerals zinc, magnesium, and chromium play a role in controling blood glucose levels. But other minerals are also involved, such as molybdenum and manganese.
Certain B vitamins play a direct role in the metabolism of glucose, such as vitamins B1, B2, and B3. B vitamins and other nutrients involved in detoxification processes indirectly affect glucose metabolism because your toxin load affects your mitochondria's ability to metabolize glucose.
Although not a vitamin, lipoic acid can be considered a micronutrient and has a strong influence on blood sugar control. It has also been used as a therapeutic agent to treat non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which often accompanies diabetes.
Deficiencies of micronutrients are important in the development of diabetes (and many other conditions as well). So the low nutrient density of the food supply is a key contributor to the diabetes epidemic.
In particular, the very low nutrient density of the hyper-processed foods that characterize the Standard American Diet is perhaps the greatest contributor because hyper-processed foods are both deficient in minerals and high in toxins.
But even people that eat an organic, unprocessed diet often have nutrient deficiencies and accumulate toxins, and sometimes develop diabetes. Industrialization of organic agriculture has led to organic food that is often not much more nutrient dense than non-organic food, and sometimes less so.
The most nutrient-dense foods are often those grown with what are now being called "regenerative agriculture" methods, which is essentially what organic agriculture started out to be but then got watered down, metchanized, and industrialized.
Inflammation and Gut Health
In recent years, awareness has grown in the scientific and medical community that systemic inflammation is a major driver of diabetes. But in mainstream medicine, doctors act like the cause of the inflammation is unknown.
However, the main cause if systemic inflammation is well-established. Imbalances in the gut's population of microbes (called "dysbiosis") and hyperpermeability and inflammation of the gut lining lead to systemic inflammation in the body.
Systemic inflammation impairs the function of insulin receptors embedded in the membranes surrounding cells. When this happens, insulin resistance and high blood sugar are the result, potentially leading to full-blown diabetes.
Research has demonstrated that people with diabetes have very different bacteria in their guts than people without diabetes. So the microbiome of the gut appears to be a key factor, though it is not known for certain whether diabetes is caused by the bacteria in the gut, or the bacteria in the gut change in response to diabetes.
Sometimes all that is needed to reverse diabetes is to fix problems in the gut. But that is not always an easy task because there are so many causes of gut dysfunction, some of them very well-hidden or underappreciated, such as flawed dental work or head and neck injuries.
Sleep and Circadian Rhythm
Disrupted sleep and circadian rhythm is another underappreciated contributor to diabetes. Just one night of inadequate sleep increases blood sugar and insulin resistance.
It also raises cortisol (the main stress hormone), causes unhealthy changes in the gut microbiome and can impair detoxification proceses, all of which contribute to the development of insulin resistance and diabetes.
Many people have suboptimal sleep without even realizing it. One of the big causes is sleep apnea. Often people don't realize that they stop breathing at night and start to wake up. This can happen many times per hour, yet they do not wake up enough to realize that it is happening.
Other people have overt insomnia and know that they don't sleep optimall,y. They may have trouble falling asleep or trouble staying asleep. And there are dozens of causes.
I hvae compiled a list of 53 causes of insomnia, ranging from parasites, dysbiosis, and food sensitivities to liver-gallbladder congestion, detoxification defects, and neurotransmitter imbalances, as well as genetic traits that increase susceptibility to these issues.
It can be a complex maze of causality, but if you have a good map, you can find your way out.
The Bottom Line in Diabetes
Toxins, genetics, micronutrient status, inflammation, gut dysfunction, and sleep are key contributors to the development of diabetes, but they aren't the only ones.
The bottom line is that diabetes is not merely a function of how many calories or carbohydrate a person eats, or whether they are overweight. In many cases, it may be important to look at multiple other factors in order to find all of the root causes so that you can root them out.
This is where the Bio-Individual Blueprint can help. It is a system designed to look at nearly every known causal factor in the development of disease, including factors that go far beyond toxins, nutrients, and genetics that most people never suspect could be driving their symptoms and conditions.
Some of what we do in the Bio-Individual Blueprint system is test for toxins, genetics, micronutrient status, genetics, gut health, inflammation, and other potential root causes that can lead to diabetes and other conditions.
To learn more about the overall structure of the Bio-Individual Blueprint, download the Bio-Individual Blueprint Roadmap and watch the walkthrough video here.