Oh whee! I think this is the first war zone thread I actually started in the many, many years I've been posting here.

I guess when I think of "eating ones way to diabetes" I think more of the issues of eating a high, refined carb diet and subsequently insulin resistance rather than obesity being the cause. Obesity, IMHO, is just another symptom.

Cats don't get diabetes in the wild. But you start feeding them a typical domestic cat diet, which is much higher carb, and they start getting diabetes at rather shockingly high rates. It takes a long time for most cats, just like it does for humans. Put them back on their normal carnivorous diet without the carb and the diabetes usually or often (not sure which) goes away, or at least you don't need to inject insulin anymore.

Now, when you do something wacky like feed animals what they haven't evolved to eat, I just think it's weird to call their illnesses derived from that as some sort of genetic defect.

T2 is brought on by diet. I don't know how many times the phenomenon has to get replayed for some folks to see the pattern: Population with virtually no diabetes adopts western diet and suddenly huge swaths of the population are getting it.

Cats that live in the wild do also get a lot more exercise, have more erratic gaps between meals (intermittent fasting?), have to deal with the cold weather...

Do we know cats do not get diabetes in the wild? Has someone caught some strays and checked? Wild cats don't visit doctors and say "My feet hurt and I can't stop urinating"...as far as I know.

Do we know if there is a life expectancy difference? Could domestic cats be living longer than wild ones do, and therefore getting diabetes because they survived longer?

I do think the wild cats I hang out with in Spain and France are healthier than many of the pet ones I know in the UK. They look a lot smaller, but more energetic and active. The fact they are eating a natural diet is bound to be part of it. I am wondering if there is any evidence about the issue.

ohh my take is it is both genetics and lifestyle problems because we are not talking of self contained entities. We are talking of system that interacts.
Genes interact and manifest themselves with the environment and lifestyle and lifestyle choices are determined partly by genetics and partly by the environment.

Really, there cannot be either or about it.

Personally i like to think that to some extent what we can do about our health is in our hands even with failed genetics. Hindu philosophy has one neat word for both genetic evolution of your perticular gene and what you have done preivously in your life called Karma. Blame it on it and move on with what you can do.

Not properly acknowledging the cause of diabetes means we'll never get anywhere, as a society, in preventing it. At least not until someone can conjure up a pharmaceutical to take the harm out of the lifestyle. Why do that for eating too many refined carbs and not do it for smoking?

Well , we know that it is genetics, lifestyle and environment in no order of priority

People hear what they want to hear.

If I say; "you can eat your way to diabetes", some people hear "You're diabetic because you're fat", which isn't what I said or implied at all.

I think our environmental exposure from birth, or inherited genetics make us predisposed to developing diabetes; but it is all the choices we make (knowingly or unknowingly) along the way that determine if we will have diabetes T2......

If we can learn to look at being fat and/or diabetic as both symptoms of something bigger happening within us, then we can lose some defense mechanisms and work together to try and help each other.

A metabolic disorder is what we have......

It is human nature, to look for complicated solutions, even to simple problems. If the answer is too easy, we dismiss it, as it can't be that easy. But, sometimes simple answers are the best solutions.

Put simply; I am where I am today. What I did in the past got me here. What I do today will get me to where I am in the future. If I keep doing the same things I did in the past, I can only expect more of the same in the future. If I do something different today, then my future has a chance at changing.

There are two major things I must do if I'm diabetic and want to control it. Control my mouth and my activity. There are many other things we can do, but controlling our mouth and our activity are by far the things we can do that will give us the most benefit.

Woulda, shoulda, coulda is not going to change anything. Acceptance of "what is" and doing something NOW and not worrying about all the stuff that preceded as though a thorough understanding of genetics and human disgetive evolution is going to suddenly make things all go away...

Anyway, I hope I sounded controversial enough....

Actually, domestic cats started out in Africa, very dry and hot conditions.

T2 is carb metabolizing problem, why would a wild cat who doesn't normally eat carbs ever get diabetes? I don't know of any studies, just what my vet tells me and what I have read. Oddly putting cats on low carb diets cures their diabetes if you catch it early enough.

"Catkins" cures diabetes

Feline Diabetes And Your Cat


From http://www.yourdiabeticcat.com/faq.html (Vet web site)


There's more on the front page with references to wild cat's diets.

finally...

http://www.uq.edu.au/ccah/index.html?page=43391&pid=0
Bottom of page 6 describes that high carbohydrate ingestion leads to insulin resistance.

But that's what is wrong. There's a very important priority and that is lifestyle.

Having a diabetic gene is completely unimportant if you don't have the lifestyle that'll make it pop into action.

I can't find it right now, but I thought I read an article in the paper recently about a near-epidemic of diabetes in cattle.

In looking for that article, I came across something else, which I find *very* interesting:



from: http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...70627225459.htm

and:



from: http://lifetwo.com/production/node/...-for-diabetes-2

More food for thought eh?

this is a different question.
what is the cause of diabetese?

the answer is lifestyle, environment and genetics. Priority has nothing to do with it. If there is a computer simulated world with these three things, I could reduce the effect of each othese in varying degrees and reduce diabetes.


If the question is what can we do abt it and (since I dont have that computer simulation). Then I will say I dont have much control on genetics and environment that much so I will choose lifestyle 100%. Let me change that see if there is a change. if yes hurrayyy. If not only lifestyle changes cannot do much once you have arrived at a diagnosis.


If the question now is how can we prevent this whole thing from happening. then first thing is again what we can definitely do change lifestyle. Doesnt mean getting some kickass way of interception of passing genes and DNA spruicing will not fix the problem. The problem is there is not technology to do that. Same with the environment.


It is hard to say if just lifestyle changes is enough even in this scenario.

"food for thought"

To me, it sometimes means; more useless crap to process without it adding any value to my life.......

That is true, but what if there is more than one gene you want to leave sleeping, and what prevents diabetes aggravates the other one? If you look at the whole picture, could there be any harm done by trying to prevent it on a large scale? I am sitting here in a country (the UK) where so much enthusiasm has been put in to preventing skin cancer, that a whole new generation of young children are being affected by ricketts, a disease which had been basically wiped out since the end of WW2. One poor young mother lost her 6 month old baby because she was so afraid of it getting skin cancer in twenty years time.

Thank you for moving the subject and pointing out the threadjacking Nancy, we were rather swamping that other thread, and I am sorry.

Plus, I am going to explore the information about cats, cheers for that too.

[QUOTE=Nancy LC]

I am sure they did, but the wild, as in stray domestic cats, that I know in France, live outdoors in cold winters now. If you were comparing big cats to pet domestic cats in the first place, I am sorry I misunderstood. I meant wild living domestic cats.

1. Define "shockingly high rates". Better yet, please link to the JAVMA or other veterinary medicine journal article that has published this data since I wasn't aware someone finally got around to compiling the statistics outside of (1) non-representative-of-real-life teaching hospital records and/or (2) since 1999. Please be sure it is able to account for and differentiate the the Types and causes of DM. Thanks.

2. I have seen DM in obese cats as young as 11-12 months of age. I have also seen juvenile DM in cats younger than that though those are usually due to non-diet related issues.

3. While dietary adjustment of carbohydrate and/or fiber has been proven to increase the likelihoold of achieving remission (i.e., transient DM) up to four-fold over insulin and other adjunct therapies alone, diet alone may or may not reverse the condition. There are no guarantees and it depends on the individual's disease severity and response to dietary manipulation.

The fact remains the driving force behind cats achieving remission is to gain control of the hyperglycemia in order to mitigate/resolve beta cell damage via glucose- and lipo- toxicity. Insulin remains the proven way to accomplish this as quickly as possible in order to stack the odds in the pancreas's favor. Preserve/restore beta cell function and they either bounce back completely (remission) or at least retain enough beta cell function to be easily regulated.

Fetch, perhaps you can answer this question, do cats in the "wild" eating a typical diet of bugs, small rodents, birds etc get diabetes?