Diabetes and Obesity Are The Hallmarks of Metabolic Disease (short version)
Obesity or excess weight in itself does not necessarily mean that a person has metabolic disease.
There are people with excess weight and obesity who do not have ANY metabolic problems (such as diabetes, hypertension, or insulin resistance). In the endocrine world we classify this subtype of obesity as “metabolically healthy obesity” (MHO). Just the same, not all thin people are healthy. There are a lot of us who do not need to gain a lot of weight for those excess pounds to make us very unhealthy. I can attest to this myself as being someone who carries their weight in an “apple shaped” distribution (Fig 1).
When people accumulate their fat viscerally or “in the belly” (by the way, where you deposit your fat depends mostly on your genetics) that fat is more metabolically active and causes more inflammation (due to higher release of free fatty acids into the circulation.
We are what we eat. If we are eating inflammatory foods such as processed and refined sugars (60% of the standard American diet comes from processed foods) you will accumulate metabolically inflamed fat and develop metabolic disease.
The demographic of youth and children under 20 that are getting the highest rates of T2D are racial and ethnic minorities such as Blacks, Latinx and Native Americans.
Read the full article (click on image).
Dr. Casimiro’s first blog post delves into:
- The difference between the obesity that afflicts most Americans versus metabolically healthy obesity.
- How fat expansion leads to the development of metabolically inflamed fat which disrupts the intestinal barrier, and increases the risk of type 2 diabetes.
- Discusses the current trends in the prevalence of diabetes and how this is now mostly affecting minority youth.
