Diabetes - the famine survivor's syndrome

Now I know this won’t comes as a shock to you but over 7 million Australian are overweight or obese and it’s not just adults.
It’s also happening to our children and young people and there has never been a greater call to beat the drum and “Battle the Bulge”. The experts say ours maybe the first generation to see our children die before us.

Here’s a theory that doesn’t let us off the hook in that battle but explains why we are like we are.

Those of us trying to reduce our waist line are famine survivors in a pickle. If we go back many generations before the agricultural and industrial revolutions created farms and made food easy to get, there were heaps of war and famine.

Let’s look at how the aborigines survived the over 40,000 years on the Australian landscape. I remember seeing a colour film of the weeks before the South Australian desert at Woomera became a nuclear test site. A tribe of bush dwelling aboriginals , frightened at seeing trucks and soldiers, were taken from the bush to the ‘safety’ of town. They were lean and muscular and a further story was filmed some time ago in the town where the hunters and gathers were taken. The men had all died and the women were obese and all had type 2 diabetes.

Why? They, like so many of us have evolved a special gene. That famine gene allowed them to store energy in the good times, when they had plentiful tucker from gathering seeds, roots and fruit and also the excess fat from the animals they tracked, ran after and hunted.

The tribe was always on the move, hunting and gathering and this gene kept them alive in the bad times when it was difficult to find food. Each generation has polished this gene and made it work better and the genetic gift, if you like, was the same elsewhere in the world. The famine gene was with most surviving people who, over generations had the same periodic shortage of food.

People from Scotland, Ireland and England, the many millions from China, Japan and India all had this benefit and were able to survive famine. Then after the agricultural and industrial revolutions, it all changed.

Food became more plentiful so hunting and gathering stopped. Living in towns and cities became the norm and people stopped moving from place to place. Generation after generation this got worse until the Obesity Epidemic of this century.

There is good evidence we move 30% less than our grandparents if we accept 30% in 2 generations imagine how little we move compared to the hunters and gathers. The combination of that marvellous gene that helped us to evolve and the need to move which was so necessary to evolve, was no longer of any use.

I like to call it ‘Future Shock’, because we have had so little time to appreciate how we have come to the obesity epidemic and no time to evolve a new gene to show us the way out. To help us manage the energy from mountains of food and encourage us to get on the march again.

Now the problems of obesity are huge and we all know that. We develop high cholesterol by eating too much saturated fat, get high blood pressure and have escalating blood glucose and all this increases the risk of heart attack, stroke and type 2 Diabetes. So what are we going to do about it?

Believe it or not there is some good news from the internationally famous, Oxford Health Alliance who say that 80% of the conditions which knock us off the perch before our time are reversible.

OK! It’s not easy but if we don’t smoke we don’t get lung cancer, if we watch or weight and move more we can reverse the thrust towards ill health.  Good science has allowed us to understand what makes us sick and search for the health targets we need to reach that will reduce our ever present risk.

I was on ‘Sunrise’ a few weeks ago, talking that reduction and about those ‘magic medical numbers’ or targets. Blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar and off course, the waist measurement and I had just announced that sports presenter, and Mark Beretta was well and truly on target. Mark’s blood tests were great, so was his blood pressure and his waist measurement was well under the risk line of 94 cm for blokes and 80cms for women.

In the ad break, Mark said, “let's measure your waist Doc and yep! I was 98 and had at least 4 centimetres to lose. As well as that little warning, I admit I have a family history of type 2 Diabetes and had lost the plot about doing my morning walk of 15,000 steps.

It’s hard to keep on, keeping on in a never ending ‘eating and activity plan’ but the benefits of having a healthy diet and to keep on the move are very real indeed. But every day is a new day and what’s that famous line? ‘Every long journey starts with a few steps in the right direction.

It means a couple of weeks to review  The D’Arcy Food, Mood and Action diary, talk with my dietician whose promise is to make me active , full and happy, change  what I can, accept what I can't and have the wisdom to know the difference.

I’ll let you know how I go.  In the mean time - Keep moving!

For more information on how to tackle diabetes - go to the Diabetes Channel - http://www.diabeteschannel.com.au