Monday 30 May 2005

Pic of the day: Grass, in this case from the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Screenshot from the anime Boys Be, which is incidentally highly recommended in its own right.

Grass & diabetes

All things are connected, once we look around. Even my biochemistry and the green green grass of home. Probably.

From my early childhood on, I have had an amazingly flexible sugar metabolism. Perhaps it is in my beautiful genes, which I for each year more regrets having not passed on to a new generation. (Not that kids are all fun and games; they are a bother and horribly expensive. But the world would be a better place with more Itlands, which says a lot about the world.) Whatever the reason, I did not grow hungry like other kids. I could spend the whole day and not notice a thing. I did not grow hungry, irritable (more than usual) or weak if I didn't eat. Thus, my parents were hard pressed to make me eat anything I did not enjoy for the pure taste of it. I was always the skinny boy at school, and entered puberty a year after my classmates.

This nifty genetic bonus makes it harder for me to observe blood sugar levels directly the way some of you can. You can actually feel when your blood sugar is low, you feel weak or restless and hungry in your brain rather than just your stomach. For me, this takes a lot more than skipping a meal. I walk off on an empty stomach, burn hundreds of kcal, come home and because I am hungry my stomach hurts so I can't eat. (My stomach is not very smart.) The hours pass by, and I still don't get weak, at least if I drink a little water eventually.

My "superior" genes managed to give both of my parents age-related diabetes. (Or, to be blunt, fat-related, although at least my father was never obese in any sane person's eyes.) I suspect that we somehow have the ability to keep our liver stocked with glycogen, while other livers may be less on top of this job and run out of sugar faster. This again means that my family probably burns a higher proportion of fat compared to sugar in our day to day life. This fits with the observation that I was skinny when young, as was my mother. But if we continue to eat fat, sooner or later we start to build it up. And when that happens, we are doomed. While some fill their fat depots first and their sugar depots later, I do it the other way around. So if I grow fat, the next stop is diabetes. Probably the same for my brothers and their numerous offspring.

***

There is actually a good reason why this would be true. Because the terrain is excellent for grazing but not too good for grain, milk and meat have been staple foods for untold generations. Of course the local farmers also grow potatoes, some vegetables and also fruit if they have a sunny hillside. As you know by now, the brain runs pretty much exclusively on carbs, and contrary to popular belief farmers do use their brains. But meat and fish were not luxury food, and definitely not milk. When I grew up, a natural part of dinner was still pork in liquid molten fat. I am not kidding you. Fat was ... OK, not a beverage, but pretty close. We used to mash the potatoes and pour fat over them, I remember. Stuff like that should kill humans before they reach 50, but the life expectancy was around 85-90.

So here's my theory: Somehow my ancestors had become calibrated differently from the wheat-growing peoples of mainland Europe. Instead of the cells in the body switching to fat after 20 minutes of sustained work, they were probably running on the stuff by default, or as soon as we got out of bed. I don't think this is an X-men class mutation, just natural selection pushing us into one extreme end of the spectrum. There are probably people who are even more like that, such as eskimos and other polar hunters, whose only carbs come from liver. Anyway, the net result is that it takes a lot more to deplete our sugar reserves. (Technically glycogen reserves, but the liver converts them to blood sugar as needed.)

The downside of this is that if we keep eating more fat than we burn, eventually we will get fat like anyone else. With less manual labor this is only a matter of time. And once that happens, we start out in the same place where others arrive when they start to assume spherical shape. At that point, the massive signal from their fat depots forces the body to stop burning sugar by default. With the liver full and sugar pouring in, insulin levels just keep rising to no effect.

Or perhaps I still don't know how those things work. (Actually, I really don't know how the adipose tissues cause insulin resistance, only that they do.) But it makes a kind of sense and fits the facts nicely. I suppose further experiments are in order. It would be cool to test my blood sugar from time to time. Now that a huge part of the population has type 2 diabetes (and more and more every day) such testing equipment should be pretty cheap. Wonder if I could just buy it off the shelf? For the sake of science. It would be mega cool. And people already think I am weird, so that's no concern.