Having a healthy lifestyle as an adult — eating right, exercising, etc. — has more influence on your chances of developing diabetes than childhood risk factors, a new study from the United Kingdom shows. What the researchers found curious is that the findings contradict previously-held beliefs.
Researchers from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK observed 412 men and women from childhood to adulthood and found that fatter adults were more likely to have increased insulin resistance, which is a risk marker for Type 2 diabetes. The team found that childhood factors like birth weight and nutrition had limited impact — something previously believed to be significant.
Frankly, I’m not surprised by these findings, which were published in Diabetes/Metabolism Research and Reviews. These results just affirm what researchers around the world have been concluding. Eat right, exercise, and maintain a healthy weight, and you’ll have less of a chance of getting diabetes.
Sure enough, study leader Dr. Mark Pearce says his study “suggests that the life you lead as an adult has the biggest influence on your health, in terms of diabetes risk, in later life.”
2 thoughts on “Bad Adult Lifestyle = Diabetes Risk”
I totally agree. Type 2 Diabetes is a disease of lifestyle. If your childhood plays any part it is in the attitudes about food and activity that you learned from your environment as a child. Some people would like to blame their genetics for their developing diabetes, but I think that’s a fallacy as well. You can have all the family connections in the world, but you can still have your own lifestyle that does not contribute to insulin resistance and diabetes. It’s up to each us to break the cycle of ignorance and abuse.
I agree with the notion that type 2 diabetes is a product of lifestyle, but adopting a healthy lifestyle in adulthood is a tad late for the kids that are currently being diagnosed with type 2. Childhood is definitely playing a role for them.
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