How can we better understand type 2 diabetes?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Tässä sinulle Haigu, joka tekee arkipäivästä vähemmän govan. Vaik ei huvita, joskus on silti paggo, onneksi on jugu. Gogeile pehmeää herkkoa! Oi yogumiga mago! E Lovena. Täytkö eloa? Tällä viikolla kaaren karnevaalissa on luvassa 5 päivää mutka hintoja, ja pikkuRAH on herkkuja keskiviikosta sunnuntaihin. Kaara suorinta reittiä kaareen napsimaan parhaat päältä. Katso tarjouks kaarenkarnevaali.fi.
Hello and welcome to What's Up Docs, BBC Radio 4's health and well-being podcast. I'm Dr. Chris. I'm his identical twin brother, Dr. Zand. Each week we take on an issue of health and well-being. We pull it apart to figure out what you need to know about and what you can completely ignore. Chris, today we're talking about a health condition that is becoming much more common, especially around younger people. It's tripled over the last thirty years. A hundred years ago, it was almost unheard of. That's right, common and misunderstood. Patients are often blamed for having this condition, and that's important because it affects so many of us. Almost one in ten people in the UK, and a great number of them may be undiagnosed.
There's also confusion about whether whether or not it can be cured and how best to manage it. We're talking about type two diabetes, arguably the defining condition of the modern era. Chris, can I tell you about the first time I remember seeing a patient with type 2 diabetes in hospital? Yes. So I had a professor, she was a type 2 diabetes expert, and she said, Alexander, come and examine this patient. It always tickles me when people call you Alexander. The occasional professor and our mum. Yeah. And so she took me to this patient's bedside. This is a patient she knew very well. And she said, Examine this document. Gentlemen, please. It's part of medical training. Examine this patient, figure out what's wrong with them, without speaking to the patient.
So I examined him and I didn't find anything wrong with him that was remarkable. He looked extremely well, and she took my hand and placed it on his tummy and using her hand ran my hand over. the completely smooth dome of this man's tummy. And she said this is what we call the apple shaped man. And We had just begun to figure out that fat that accumulates around your middle in this distribution pattern puts you at higher risk of lots of problems, including type 2 diabetes. And she wanted to show me how to look for patients with this risk, because he had a very ordinary body type. And I think the reason it was so important was because it turned out that understanding the relationship between body shape and
And the pattern of fat distribution in your body is very, very key to understanding what type two diabetes is and why it's different from other kinds of diabetes. It's an amazing story. Some listeners may feel it's anachronistic. I mean, this was well over twenty-five years ago, wasn't it? I don't want anyone listening to think that if they come into hospital nowadays that a doctor's gonna drag medical students and sort of pat their tummies and point out their body shape. What's astounding about your story is to think back not very long ago, how sort of primitive our thinking was about why patients lived with particular body sizes and shapes, what risks those shapes presented and and what exactly these conditions were.
And Chris, I think what's very important to say, and you usually say this better than me, is patients are not to blame for having type 2 diabetes. Back then, we largely thought of type 2 diabetes as being a problem about sugar. And as we're going to see in this episode, it's not really about sugar.
What is type 2 diabetes and why is it becoming more common?
It's about fat distribution. It's a much, much more complex illness. That's exactly right, Sandy. And we're going to come, of course, to how genetics, central obesity, fat distribution affects your risk of lots of things and how that works. To create type two diabetes? If we're talking about diabetes, we need to be very clear that we're talking about type two diabetes, not type one or any other kind.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–4:14
2
What is type 2 diabetes and why is it becoming more common?
4:14–11:06
3
Why does fat distribution, especially around the waist, increase diabetes risk?
11:06–20:05
4
How does the body normally regulate blood glucose and insulin?
20:05–31:06