Why isn’t it possible to suddenly get diabetes after a single large sugar binge?
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We don’t fully understand diabetes. The type you develop is a special type. Let’s ignore the type you’re born with or is genetically predisposed.
The way the type you develop happens seems to be related to having the systems in your body that regulate sugar via insulin stop working properly. One way we think that happens is sort of how some cancers form: if you do a little damage to an organ it can heal, but if you keep damaging that organ over and over the odds it doesn’t heal properly go up.
So eating too much sugar stresses that system and damages it a little, but you can’t destroy it in one sugar binge. It has a “110%”, so to speak, and once it’s working so hard it’s getting hurt it doesn’t work harder than that. In the end there are much more direct bad things that might happen to your body from that much sugar but it’s likely a ton of it will just pass through your system unabsorbed (or you will vomit an awful lot.)
Doing that every day, every week, or every month etc. increases your risk. But everyone’s body is different, so a frustrating thing is some people can develop diabetes from relatively small amounts of “abuse” whereas other people never worry about sugar and never face any consequences. There probably IS someone out there who is one sugar binge away from developing a permanent problem. Nature isn’t fair.
(Also some of the conditions we call “diabetes” are actually more directly problems with the organs that regulate insulin like the pancreas. Having those conditions makes your body pretty much act the same way as diabetes, so outside the context of a doctor trying to form a treatment plan the general public doesn’t really gain much from understanding the nuances between the dozens of different distinct conditions that might be “diabetes”.)
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