ELI5. If you eat a butt-load of sugar at once (think 10 cadbury creme eggs worth), is a single instance enough to trigger type 2 diabetes? If it’s not, why can the body handle that much sugar sometimes, but eventually it causes type 2 diabetes?
In: Biology
If you eat too much sugar, it can shock you. That’s not diabetes. If you eat too much sugar all the time, that increases the tisk that your pancreas qon’t keep up and you’ll become diabetic. Changing your diet is step 0 of most treatment for diabetes, and “stop eating all that sugar” will be a recommendation.
Type 2 diabetes is insulin resistance. Think of it like how when there’s a loud humming noise you eventually stop hearing it because you just get used to it. That will never happen with a single loud burst of noise. If the loud noise is continuous and loud enough, you will stop perceiving it while it continues to destroy your hearing and making you unable to handle normal noises appropriately anymore.
Diabetes is insulin resistence. It has to occur over time, not all once.
Fun fact, if you live long enough, then you will be resistent to insulins regardless of diet or sugar consumption. Diabetics just cause it to occur much sooner in life.
What you’re referring to is known as a glucose tolerance test in medicine. It is a tool sometimes used to evaluate diabetes
Type 2 diabetes is caused by insulin resistance. When we eat carbohydrates, our blood sugar goes up. In response, our pancreas produces insulin. Insulin is a hormone that triggers cells to uptake glucose. When the glucose enters the cells, blood glucose decreases. When blood sugars are high frequently, the cells become less responsive to the presence of insulin and blood sugar remains high. This is type 2 diabetes.
Eating sugar doesn’t cause diabetes, at least not directly.
Type 1 is an autoimmune disease where your body attacks the pancreas.
Type 2 has several risk factors. The only one sugar would affect is obesity, as it can cause excessive weight gain. Others are genetics, and ethnicity.
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