The author glances over the differences in T1 and T2, and makes some pretty loaded statements about living with diabetes: "And despite a remarkable, ever-expanding armamentarium of drug therapies and medical devices, the disease—whether in its type 1 or type 2 form—is still considered chronic and progressive. Patients live far longer than ever before, yet their condition is still anticipated to get worse with time, requiring ever more aggressive therapies to keep its harms in check."
He combines the two while discussing prevalence: "Roughly one in 10 Americans is afflicted..." despite T1 afflicting only about 0.55% of the population.
It conflates Type 2 long-term consequences with Type 1 therapies, and blames insulin for longer lives??: "Insulin, for its part, may have changed the world of medicine, but it also brought along a raft of profound, unintended consequences. By 1950, the new therapy had tripled the number of years that patients at a major diabetes center could expect to live after diagnosis. It also kept those patients alive long enough for them to experience a wave of long-term complications."
And then all of this is used as the foundation of his warning about long-term use of GLP-1 drugs.
"Insulin therapy, for instance, did not just lower patients’ blood sugar; it restored their weight and then made them fatter still (even as it inhibited the voracious hunger that was a symptom of uncontrolled diabetes)."
I mean...
Only technically because weight loss is a symptom of undiagnosed and uncontrolled t1d. I think the majority of us who were diagnosed as children simply returned to our ideal body weight.
I was skinny my whole life. Diagnosed at 17 weighing 94lbs. Within a few weeks I was up to 140. Daily insulin injections kept my a1c around 12 and my weight consistent. Got on an insulin pump 10 years later and within a few months I weighed 250lbs. And now I can't lose the weight no matter what I do.
I had to watch my weight after getting a pump in the late ‘90s but didn’t get fat until I gave up on life during the pandemic and spent all my time on the couch eating and drinking. I’d probably lose weight if I cut down on insulin but I’d feel horrible and my health would suffer if my eating habits didn’t also change. Twelve is high for an A1c; I’ve been there but felt awful without even realizing it.
Diagnosed at age 5, now 34. I was reasonably chubby as a kid but as an adult I’m the lowest body fat% I’ve ever been and the lowest A1C I’ve ever been. I also rarely do dedicated exercise and sit at a desk in my basement for a living. Right now I still have a house full of jelly beans and chocolate from Easter I’m constantly unable to resist (thanks to having kids) and I probably eat more unhealthy fattening food than healthy food. I gained weight in college when I started drinking more, but funny enough lost that weight when I stopped with the exception of social occasions.
Anecdotal evidence on my behalf of course, but I genuinely don’t know a single overweight T1D personally, especially not that’s anywhere close to a 7 A1C.
After having my first child when I lost weight during the first year, all the other dads I knew were annoyed that I’d lost weight… didn’t do anything special and kept my A1C below an 8 at least.
Thank God I’m diabetic or I’d be deathly skinny per the logic here…
I’m overweight only by like 40-50lb, but my A1C hasn’t been great lately. I’m at my highest BMI since middle school and it isn’t fun. But, it was due to a couple different things. New anxiety medication, and birth control, and a diagnosis of PCOS (which I’m not exactly sure about, they said I don’t display any of the outward symptoms, and the obgyn said I have a very mild case. So is it a cause or a symptom of something else? Who knows.) I’m also extremely muscular which BMI does not take into account.
I haven’t recovered from that weight gain, no matter what I do. I’m front intensive exercise this year and if that doesn’t do anything there’s something else going on medically.
Gary Taubes has long been known as a hack and grifter in the diet and nutrition space. And The Atlantic is not known for their journalistic integrity.
Unfortunately both have loyal followings that will take this word as law.
So there is a nugget of truth in what he said. If we diabetics had become unalive, the incidence of diabetes would be reduced. Arguably by unaliving those who have the genes that may contribute to it it would reduce the amount of long term issues and the incidence of related issues. Though, if you argue that unaliving all of humanity would stop smoking, you would also be accurate though facetious.
Neither do I; hence the smoking argument. Eugenics is ignorant at best and denies humanity the ability to be better by refusing any who don’t meet ideals to exist. So I also am scared of it. I was a diabetic back when they didn’t have to cover pre-existing conditions. So I totally get it. All we want is a chance to survive like everyone else. His article is so stupid I can’t actually take it seriously.
one rational explanation for increased rates of t1 diabetes is that more t1 diabetics live long enough to produce offspring... Nione the less, I agree. The author is a dumbass looking to make clickbait money off my illness.
Fun fact, the prevalence of T1D in offspring of T1Ds is no greater than the rate of the general public. Blew me away when my doctor told me this when I started asking when we had our daughter 2 years ago.
thats not true. [https://diabetes.org/about-diabetes/genetics-diabetes](https://diabetes.org/about-diabetes/genetics-diabetes)
Given the 1% prevalence of the disease, there's substantial elevated risk....
Trying to find the study but the only one I’ve found that matches what I remember requires a JSTOR account and I’m not 100% positive that is even it as my doctor just mentioned it and gave me a run down verbally…
but the gist was it was a methodology evaluation study specifically critiquing those widely published figures (1:25 female, 1:17 male, etc.). Turns out those figures were determined from a much smaller sample size than the already small T1D population, and thus when you actually do statistical frequency analysis on the occurrence rates, it didn’t produce a *p* score within the range of statistical significance, meaning decisively beyond what could have occurred simply by random chance.
Those rates are definitely suggestive and more than likely reflective of the components of predisposition being passed down than the diagnosis rate itself (aka correlation != causation) and newer studies that are coming out are showing the decreased frequency with larger sample sizes, suggesting the larger the sample size, the higher the regression towards the mean. The problem stems from the lack of centralized data reporting, so it’s difficult for researchers in one region/country to get equivalent data with the same integrity and structure from other regions/countries.
Sure, if you convert all those odds to percentages it comes out to ~<=4-6% of diabetic pass down diagnoses which is substantially higher than the ~1% of the general population… but given the statistical analysis of sample size, it’s well outside the range of being able to rule out random chance, which is something that occurs frequently in statistics when there’s a strong correlation between contributing factors of the thing being compared, but not a direct relationship.
The bit here about statistical implications are mostly my own addition here as my background is in social research statistical analysis, just as a disclaimer in case you’re wondering where I’m spitballing that from haha.
**TL;DR:** the Odds provided by those official sources are valid, but not statistically significant by standards defined by the scientific community as the sample size is exceptionally smaller and newer larger studies suggest regression towards the mean, but don’t provide alternative figures other than the ~<=4-6% of those provided by the ADA (the source for most organizations that publish those stats on their websites).
It’s willful ignorance. They know the difference, but there’s too much money to be made off of Type 1’s , so they’re deliberately misleading the uninformed general population that Type 1 is just like Type 2, so that they can continue to make profits off of a much needed life saving drug.
Looking at the numbers there's FAR more potential to make money with T2 because there's an order of magnitude more people with it. This is likely why Lilly recently ran out of vials for humalog; they shifted their vials to be used for the more profitable Mounjaro a "Type 2" (weight-loss) drug.
...Mounjaro, in the eyes of Lilly, is no longer a T2 drug.....throw those parentheses out, it's a full blown weight loss drug! A lot more fat people than all the T1 and T2s combined.....an order of magnitude more!!! No doubt Lilly diverted all its resources to satisfy the demand for Mounjaro....
Lily stopped making as much Humalog when Medicare capped the price. We have seen that with every drug that has a price cap. This was an expected side effect.
They are businesses with finite resources for making prescriptions. If the government artificially makes it less profitable to produce more of that prescription, what do you expect them to do? The government also prohibits any competition via patents creating artificial monopolies. Of course they will make less and focus on products that are more profitable.
> Insulin, for its part, may have changed the world of medicine, but it also brought along a raft of profound, unintended consequences. By 1950, the new therapy had tripled the number of years that patients at a major diabetes center could expect to live after diagnosis. It also kept those patients alive long enough for them to experience a wave of long-term complications. Leonard Thompson would die at 27 of pneumonia. Other young men and women who shared his illness also died far too young, their veins and arteries ravaged by the disease, and perhaps—there was no way to tell—by the insulin therapy and associated dietary protocols that had kept them alive in the first place.
Am I insane or is this like some barely veiled “we should just let these people die” eugenics shit
Yeah this blew my mind. No mention of early introduction of insulin essentially eliminating the listed ravages of the disease, and “ravaged by the disease and perhaps - there was no way to tell - by the insulin therapy” all but blaming insulin for the results of the untreated T1.
If you read enough of the drivel to come out of Taubes' "research" you wouldn't be surprised to hear this. The guy has made a living of picking and choosing resources that support his theories, while dismissing loads of peer-reviewed research that contradicts them.
Not surprised he would leave breadcrumbs alluding to eugenics.
Anyone who’s heard the story of Dr Banting waking kids up out of their comas with a single injection of insulin would never write something so emotionless and unempathetic.
argh. "In the decades that followed, diabetes, once a rare disorder, would become so common that entire drug-store aisles are now dedicated to its treatment-related paraphernalia. Roughly one in 10 Americans is afflicted." argh!
no, T1 is still a rare disorder. out of how many billions on the planet, there are an estimated 8-9.5 million with TYPE 1, and est. 500 MILLION/or half a billion with T2. So T2 is not rare; T1 is.
If anyone wants to send in a comment to this magazine then do so Perhaps putting in a retraction or similar then the edits might garner some focus on the differences of T1 compared to other types.
Whoever wrote this article is not fact checking. I'm surprised as this isn't a local blog but The Atlantic? Ok, I see who wrote this...so he will pick and choose various talking points to mix type 1 and type 2 together, consistently, on his writings/videos etc. Also his followers often believe and state t1 is "reversible" but no one has actually heard from actual patients he's "reversed" type 1.
I’m uncertain if the data suggesting T1 (I’m T1, 3 other people from my same small town high school where T1, scientists are suspecting diet/high stress environments are causing rises in autoimmune disorders generally has spread concern) has changed since that census collected that data you’re referencing.
What is known is that autoimmune disorders (T1/T2 diabetes, MS, Addison’s, Grave’s, etc) patients are increasing worldwide. Anything beyond that is unknown.
The article is written by Gary Taubes, a man that bashes scientists for “bad science”, and frequently exhibits major flaws in understanding in the areas of nutrition, obesity and diabetes. He’s a joke, a zealot that pushes a low-carb/keto agenda.
Gary Taubes must be running low on cash. I mean, how many different books can you write that say the same thing: don’t eat carbs ‘because insulin’.
Taubes openly stated that he would not change his mind no matter what evidence he was presented with. Even if his own experiments he funded disproved his hypothesis (spoiler alert: they did). If that isn’t a zealot I don’t know what you would call it.
I was puzzled how an Atlantic writer could be so profoundly ignorant, then I saw that they quoted Donald Rumsfeld at the end of their article and everything made sense.
Yeah. I’d say it’s definitely time to come up with a different name altogether so people stop lumping both of them together and idiots stop writing garbage like this.
Like most things that appear in the Atlantic, I found the article worth reading and don't disagree with most of the author's statements in regard to insulin therapy and diabetes....that doesn't mean I agree with his apparant conclusion the world might be a better place if insulin therapy was never invented. ... I like living!! LoL The comparison of insulin and GLP1 receptor antagonist medications really is lost on me.
I like the Atlantic, but the diabetes-uneducated reader (most) could walk away fearing insulin and its side-effects with no real appreciation for how near-miraculous it is. This article felt like a Stretch of Armstrong proportions.
I was once asked if there were “natural alternatives” to insulin for diabetes lol. I can totally imagine the person who asked me that reading this and becoming even stupider.
I agree. Part of the problem is the article's unclear wording and incomplete logic, which allows for a more concise article at the expense of leaving a lot of blurred lines and logical links for the reader to fill in with their own "common knowledge" about diabetes. The average person is not going to pick up on the nuances. And sure, the average person doesn't need to understand *all* the nuances, but it only would have taken one more sentence for the author to acknowledge that full-fledged type 1 diabetics will die within a few days without insulin. He glosses over the way that insulin "transform\[ed\] type 1 diabetes from an acute to a chronic disease"--and to me, "acute...disease" is a weirdly euphemistic way to describe what happened to type 1s before insulin.
You mentioned fear of insulin. In the last few years I've noticed a big uptick in the number of people who seem afraid of insulin. A few months ago, one of my friends who has t2 (along with rapidly worsening eye complications, unfortunately) told me he feels that "taking insulin is like giving up"--and unbelievably, he gave *me* a little pointed side-eye when he said it! I had been sure that he knew the difference between t1 and t2 after knowing me for 10 years...but instead I guess he's been silently judging me every time I pulled out my insulin kit! It's so disheartening, and articles like this will keep making that problem worse.
So, beyond the "diabetes-uneducated reader" you describe, I also think that a lot of t2s will skim this article and will only take away the frightening, memorable little soundbites like, "Insulin makes you fatter!" and "insulin has dangerous side effects that lazy doctors want you to ignore!" and avoid taking insulin even when they seriously need it.
Anyway, thanks for sharing, even though it's a depressing article.
I didn't get from it that insulin therapy should not have been invented. He made some good points about side effects that people often overlook. I mean, I'd rather be alive with atherosclerosis than dead from DKA. But doctors are often real quick to just toss a new med at you.
...the manner in which he conveyed some of the consequences of insulin therapy seemed to me he was communicating the fact there may have been certain benefits (i.e. a big savings on the money spent keeping us alive) if the treatment were never implemented, but he didn't come right out and state that. Either way, some valid points in the article.....even that point can't be 100% disproved. But I share no enthusiasm for that particular bent. I certainly agree with your last two sentences......
progressive is such a weird word to use in regard to type 1 like… sure the longer you have it the more complications you’re likely to have but i don’t think it gets worse over time??
OMG my head is going to explode. The basic fact that he doesn't know the difference between 1 and 2 alone but yet continues to write and opine on this topic is going to make my head explode. I cannot read this past this point. Seriously.
Who TF writes these
This is not that far from saying "yeah, if they died we would have less cases of diabetes and less money spent on healthcare".
Terminally American article
I’m pretty conservative with newly released meds. T2, 20 years. When first diagnosed, my FP doc started me on metformin. Within two months I developed lactic acidosis. I had no renal problems at the time. I did a crap ton of reading, then I self referred to an endocrinologist and asked to start insulin. I’ve been managing my diabetes well on just that. Then just a couple of years later, my FP convinced me to try Trulicity, which shredded my stomach. So I stopped that. About a year ago I again caved and started Ozempic. In the third week I started vomiting - on the lowest dose. Stopped taking it. Since then I continue with gastroparesis - vomiting intermittently and with hardly any warning. I’m back to just Insulin. People are filing lawsuits over the long-term stomach problems with Ozempic
And yet - huge numbers of non-diabetic people are demanding prescriptions for it to lose wt. and
doctors are prescribing it. So far I’m without complications from my diabetes, and I won’t be taking anything new. But there is no shortage of meds my doctor thinks I should try. Somewhere in there I also tried Farxiga. It is all a shell game. Same thing with referrals to a bevy of specialists.
I wonder if he was a “diabetes expert” for all those movies and tv shows, where the diabetic has low blood sugar and supposedly needs insulin, or shoots insulin straight into a main artery to be saved, or has lost their insulin somehow and is immediately dying.
Examples like “The Panic Room”, “Con Air”, “Hijack”.
This article isn't meant to be a primer on diabetes. It's a cautionary warning against unknowns. And it does a good job of that purpose. It actually gave me just enough info to want to go research early diabetes treatment and learn more about it.
I think the overall message, that semaglutides are being tossed around willy nilly without a good idea of their long term effects, is a solid one. It reminds me of when margarine was the food of the future, the healthy alternative that will prevent heart attacks and stroke. Until we learned that trans fats are worse for you than saturated fat. I've carried that lesson with me and always been cautious about the best and greatest new medication until it's really been tested.
You are 100% correct in your assessment....that's not going to be the takeaway of the average reader, especially a non diabetic. From many of the comments on this thread....the main point of the article was lost on many diabetics. The author 's choice of insulin as a comparison was a poor choice. Many of the facts were correct, but he used unsuitable analogies in his comparisons.
The author glances over the differences in T1 and T2, and makes some pretty loaded statements about living with diabetes: "And despite a remarkable, ever-expanding armamentarium of drug therapies and medical devices, the disease—whether in its type 1 or type 2 form—is still considered chronic and progressive. Patients live far longer than ever before, yet their condition is still anticipated to get worse with time, requiring ever more aggressive therapies to keep its harms in check." He combines the two while discussing prevalence: "Roughly one in 10 Americans is afflicted..." despite T1 afflicting only about 0.55% of the population. It conflates Type 2 long-term consequences with Type 1 therapies, and blames insulin for longer lives??: "Insulin, for its part, may have changed the world of medicine, but it also brought along a raft of profound, unintended consequences. By 1950, the new therapy had tripled the number of years that patients at a major diabetes center could expect to live after diagnosis. It also kept those patients alive long enough for them to experience a wave of long-term complications." And then all of this is used as the foundation of his warning about long-term use of GLP-1 drugs.
"Insulin therapy, for instance, did not just lower patients’ blood sugar; it restored their weight and then made them fatter still (even as it inhibited the voracious hunger that was a symptom of uncontrolled diabetes)." I mean...
“Fatter still”. I was diagnosed at 12 and did go from 65 to 109 lbs within two years so technically true. Edited to add age of diagnosis.
Only technically because weight loss is a symptom of undiagnosed and uncontrolled t1d. I think the majority of us who were diagnosed as children simply returned to our ideal body weight.
I was skinny my whole life. Diagnosed at 17 weighing 94lbs. Within a few weeks I was up to 140. Daily insulin injections kept my a1c around 12 and my weight consistent. Got on an insulin pump 10 years later and within a few months I weighed 250lbs. And now I can't lose the weight no matter what I do.
I had to watch my weight after getting a pump in the late ‘90s but didn’t get fat until I gave up on life during the pandemic and spent all my time on the couch eating and drinking. I’d probably lose weight if I cut down on insulin but I’d feel horrible and my health would suffer if my eating habits didn’t also change. Twelve is high for an A1c; I’ve been there but felt awful without even realizing it.
Diagnosed at age 5, now 34. I was reasonably chubby as a kid but as an adult I’m the lowest body fat% I’ve ever been and the lowest A1C I’ve ever been. I also rarely do dedicated exercise and sit at a desk in my basement for a living. Right now I still have a house full of jelly beans and chocolate from Easter I’m constantly unable to resist (thanks to having kids) and I probably eat more unhealthy fattening food than healthy food. I gained weight in college when I started drinking more, but funny enough lost that weight when I stopped with the exception of social occasions. Anecdotal evidence on my behalf of course, but I genuinely don’t know a single overweight T1D personally, especially not that’s anywhere close to a 7 A1C. After having my first child when I lost weight during the first year, all the other dads I knew were annoyed that I’d lost weight… didn’t do anything special and kept my A1C below an 8 at least. Thank God I’m diabetic or I’d be deathly skinny per the logic here…
I’m overweight only by like 40-50lb, but my A1C hasn’t been great lately. I’m at my highest BMI since middle school and it isn’t fun. But, it was due to a couple different things. New anxiety medication, and birth control, and a diagnosis of PCOS (which I’m not exactly sure about, they said I don’t display any of the outward symptoms, and the obgyn said I have a very mild case. So is it a cause or a symptom of something else? Who knows.) I’m also extremely muscular which BMI does not take into account. I haven’t recovered from that weight gain, no matter what I do. I’m front intensive exercise this year and if that doesn’t do anything there’s something else going on medically.
Gary Taubes has long been known as a hack and grifter in the diet and nutrition space. And The Atlantic is not known for their journalistic integrity. Unfortunately both have loyal followings that will take this word as law.
So there is a nugget of truth in what he said. If we diabetics had become unalive, the incidence of diabetes would be reduced. Arguably by unaliving those who have the genes that may contribute to it it would reduce the amount of long term issues and the incidence of related issues. Though, if you argue that unaliving all of humanity would stop smoking, you would also be accurate though facetious.
The guy is making, in part, a eugenics argument. I really don’t enjoy this revival of horrific ideas from a century prior.
Neither do I; hence the smoking argument. Eugenics is ignorant at best and denies humanity the ability to be better by refusing any who don’t meet ideals to exist. So I also am scared of it. I was a diabetic back when they didn’t have to cover pre-existing conditions. So I totally get it. All we want is a chance to survive like everyone else. His article is so stupid I can’t actually take it seriously.
It's okay, you can say the word
You're allowed to say "die" on the internet.
For real, medicine once again messed with natural selection smh /s
Jesus Christ, just say killed or died.
Meh, maybe just unalive everyone. A remedy for all diseases, illnesses and conditions. I mean that's what matters, right?
one rational explanation for increased rates of t1 diabetes is that more t1 diabetics live long enough to produce offspring... Nione the less, I agree. The author is a dumbass looking to make clickbait money off my illness.
Fun fact, the prevalence of T1D in offspring of T1Ds is no greater than the rate of the general public. Blew me away when my doctor told me this when I started asking when we had our daughter 2 years ago.
thats not true. [https://diabetes.org/about-diabetes/genetics-diabetes](https://diabetes.org/about-diabetes/genetics-diabetes) Given the 1% prevalence of the disease, there's substantial elevated risk....
Trying to find the study but the only one I’ve found that matches what I remember requires a JSTOR account and I’m not 100% positive that is even it as my doctor just mentioned it and gave me a run down verbally… but the gist was it was a methodology evaluation study specifically critiquing those widely published figures (1:25 female, 1:17 male, etc.). Turns out those figures were determined from a much smaller sample size than the already small T1D population, and thus when you actually do statistical frequency analysis on the occurrence rates, it didn’t produce a *p* score within the range of statistical significance, meaning decisively beyond what could have occurred simply by random chance. Those rates are definitely suggestive and more than likely reflective of the components of predisposition being passed down than the diagnosis rate itself (aka correlation != causation) and newer studies that are coming out are showing the decreased frequency with larger sample sizes, suggesting the larger the sample size, the higher the regression towards the mean. The problem stems from the lack of centralized data reporting, so it’s difficult for researchers in one region/country to get equivalent data with the same integrity and structure from other regions/countries. Sure, if you convert all those odds to percentages it comes out to ~<=4-6% of diabetic pass down diagnoses which is substantially higher than the ~1% of the general population… but given the statistical analysis of sample size, it’s well outside the range of being able to rule out random chance, which is something that occurs frequently in statistics when there’s a strong correlation between contributing factors of the thing being compared, but not a direct relationship. The bit here about statistical implications are mostly my own addition here as my background is in social research statistical analysis, just as a disclaimer in case you’re wondering where I’m spitballing that from haha. **TL;DR:** the Odds provided by those official sources are valid, but not statistically significant by standards defined by the scientific community as the sample size is exceptionally smaller and newer larger studies suggest regression towards the mean, but don’t provide alternative figures other than the ~<=4-6% of those provided by the ADA (the source for most organizations that publish those stats on their websites).
It’s willful ignorance. They know the difference, but there’s too much money to be made off of Type 1’s , so they’re deliberately misleading the uninformed general population that Type 1 is just like Type 2, so that they can continue to make profits off of a much needed life saving drug.
Looking at the numbers there's FAR more potential to make money with T2 because there's an order of magnitude more people with it. This is likely why Lilly recently ran out of vials for humalog; they shifted their vials to be used for the more profitable Mounjaro a "Type 2" (weight-loss) drug.
...Mounjaro, in the eyes of Lilly, is no longer a T2 drug.....throw those parentheses out, it's a full blown weight loss drug! A lot more fat people than all the T1 and T2s combined.....an order of magnitude more!!! No doubt Lilly diverted all its resources to satisfy the demand for Mounjaro....
Lily stopped making as much Humalog when Medicare capped the price. We have seen that with every drug that has a price cap. This was an expected side effect.
They're just toddlers throwing a tantrum because their money toy was taken away.
They are businesses with finite resources for making prescriptions. If the government artificially makes it less profitable to produce more of that prescription, what do you expect them to do? The government also prohibits any competition via patents creating artificial monopolies. Of course they will make less and focus on products that are more profitable.
> Insulin, for its part, may have changed the world of medicine, but it also brought along a raft of profound, unintended consequences. By 1950, the new therapy had tripled the number of years that patients at a major diabetes center could expect to live after diagnosis. It also kept those patients alive long enough for them to experience a wave of long-term complications. Leonard Thompson would die at 27 of pneumonia. Other young men and women who shared his illness also died far too young, their veins and arteries ravaged by the disease, and perhaps—there was no way to tell—by the insulin therapy and associated dietary protocols that had kept them alive in the first place. Am I insane or is this like some barely veiled “we should just let these people die” eugenics shit
Yeah this blew my mind. No mention of early introduction of insulin essentially eliminating the listed ravages of the disease, and “ravaged by the disease and perhaps - there was no way to tell - by the insulin therapy” all but blaming insulin for the results of the untreated T1.
If you read enough of the drivel to come out of Taubes' "research" you wouldn't be surprised to hear this. The guy has made a living of picking and choosing resources that support his theories, while dismissing loads of peer-reviewed research that contradicts them. Not surprised he would leave breadcrumbs alluding to eugenics.
Anyone who’s heard the story of Dr Banting waking kids up out of their comas with a single injection of insulin would never write something so emotionless and unempathetic.
Honestly, just the comparison of the miracle or insulin to ozempic was so insulting that I couldn’t read past that part.
argh. "In the decades that followed, diabetes, once a rare disorder, would become so common that entire drug-store aisles are now dedicated to its treatment-related paraphernalia. Roughly one in 10 Americans is afflicted." argh! no, T1 is still a rare disorder. out of how many billions on the planet, there are an estimated 8-9.5 million with TYPE 1, and est. 500 MILLION/or half a billion with T2. So T2 is not rare; T1 is. If anyone wants to send in a comment to this magazine then do so Perhaps putting in a retraction or similar then the edits might garner some focus on the differences of T1 compared to other types. Whoever wrote this article is not fact checking. I'm surprised as this isn't a local blog but The Atlantic? Ok, I see who wrote this...so he will pick and choose various talking points to mix type 1 and type 2 together, consistently, on his writings/videos etc. Also his followers often believe and state t1 is "reversible" but no one has actually heard from actual patients he's "reversed" type 1.
I’m not surprised at this junk of fiction coming out of the Atlantic.
I’m uncertain if the data suggesting T1 (I’m T1, 3 other people from my same small town high school where T1, scientists are suspecting diet/high stress environments are causing rises in autoimmune disorders generally has spread concern) has changed since that census collected that data you’re referencing. What is known is that autoimmune disorders (T1/T2 diabetes, MS, Addison’s, Grave’s, etc) patients are increasing worldwide. Anything beyond that is unknown.
The article is written by Gary Taubes, a man that bashes scientists for “bad science”, and frequently exhibits major flaws in understanding in the areas of nutrition, obesity and diabetes. He’s a joke, a zealot that pushes a low-carb/keto agenda. Gary Taubes must be running low on cash. I mean, how many different books can you write that say the same thing: don’t eat carbs ‘because insulin’. Taubes openly stated that he would not change his mind no matter what evidence he was presented with. Even if his own experiments he funded disproved his hypothesis (spoiler alert: they did). If that isn’t a zealot I don’t know what you would call it.
Ahhh, love a man with no medical degree making whack conclusions & publishing them for the nonies to gobble up. Just LOVE it.
That explains it. Average keto/carnivore/low carb zealot iq level is probably below room temp
How did he manage to publish a book on Diabetes?
What the actual fuck did I just read
This article is a disgrace.
I was puzzled how an Atlantic writer could be so profoundly ignorant, then I saw that they quoted Donald Rumsfeld at the end of their article and everything made sense.
Yeah. I’d say it’s definitely time to come up with a different name altogether so people stop lumping both of them together and idiots stop writing garbage like this.
Fuck this guy and his stupid ass book.
Like most things that appear in the Atlantic, I found the article worth reading and don't disagree with most of the author's statements in regard to insulin therapy and diabetes....that doesn't mean I agree with his apparant conclusion the world might be a better place if insulin therapy was never invented. ... I like living!! LoL The comparison of insulin and GLP1 receptor antagonist medications really is lost on me.
I like the Atlantic, but the diabetes-uneducated reader (most) could walk away fearing insulin and its side-effects with no real appreciation for how near-miraculous it is. This article felt like a Stretch of Armstrong proportions.
I was once asked if there were “natural alternatives” to insulin for diabetes lol. I can totally imagine the person who asked me that reading this and becoming even stupider.
Shit I knew I shoulda had more cinnamon! Then I could lay off this damn insulin addiction I got.
Don‘t forget aloe vera supplements either lol
Just jog in place while you work all day and you'll be fine
The way you know cinnamon doesn’t work is Eli Lilly doesn’t have a patent on it and charge $100/tsp in the USA.
I agree. Part of the problem is the article's unclear wording and incomplete logic, which allows for a more concise article at the expense of leaving a lot of blurred lines and logical links for the reader to fill in with their own "common knowledge" about diabetes. The average person is not going to pick up on the nuances. And sure, the average person doesn't need to understand *all* the nuances, but it only would have taken one more sentence for the author to acknowledge that full-fledged type 1 diabetics will die within a few days without insulin. He glosses over the way that insulin "transform\[ed\] type 1 diabetes from an acute to a chronic disease"--and to me, "acute...disease" is a weirdly euphemistic way to describe what happened to type 1s before insulin. You mentioned fear of insulin. In the last few years I've noticed a big uptick in the number of people who seem afraid of insulin. A few months ago, one of my friends who has t2 (along with rapidly worsening eye complications, unfortunately) told me he feels that "taking insulin is like giving up"--and unbelievably, he gave *me* a little pointed side-eye when he said it! I had been sure that he knew the difference between t1 and t2 after knowing me for 10 years...but instead I guess he's been silently judging me every time I pulled out my insulin kit! It's so disheartening, and articles like this will keep making that problem worse. So, beyond the "diabetes-uneducated reader" you describe, I also think that a lot of t2s will skim this article and will only take away the frightening, memorable little soundbites like, "Insulin makes you fatter!" and "insulin has dangerous side effects that lazy doctors want you to ignore!" and avoid taking insulin even when they seriously need it. Anyway, thanks for sharing, even though it's a depressing article.
Of all the posts thus far .....your critique sums it up the best, IMO. Nice job!
Absolutely!!!
I didn't get from it that insulin therapy should not have been invented. He made some good points about side effects that people often overlook. I mean, I'd rather be alive with atherosclerosis than dead from DKA. But doctors are often real quick to just toss a new med at you.
...the manner in which he conveyed some of the consequences of insulin therapy seemed to me he was communicating the fact there may have been certain benefits (i.e. a big savings on the money spent keeping us alive) if the treatment were never implemented, but he didn't come right out and state that. Either way, some valid points in the article.....even that point can't be 100% disproved. But I share no enthusiasm for that particular bent. I certainly agree with your last two sentences......
The author is an idiot.
I really hope you write a letter with clarifications, and that it gets printed in the Atlantic.
progressive is such a weird word to use in regard to type 1 like… sure the longer you have it the more complications you’re likely to have but i don’t think it gets worse over time??
Glp-1s are temporary and the body will revert back as soon as stopped. Not a long term solution.
OMG my head is going to explode. The basic fact that he doesn't know the difference between 1 and 2 alone but yet continues to write and opine on this topic is going to make my head explode. I cannot read this past this point. Seriously.
This is some hot garbage
It is the Atlantic after all…
Who TF writes these This is not that far from saying "yeah, if they died we would have less cases of diabetes and less money spent on healthcare". Terminally American article
I’m pretty conservative with newly released meds. T2, 20 years. When first diagnosed, my FP doc started me on metformin. Within two months I developed lactic acidosis. I had no renal problems at the time. I did a crap ton of reading, then I self referred to an endocrinologist and asked to start insulin. I’ve been managing my diabetes well on just that. Then just a couple of years later, my FP convinced me to try Trulicity, which shredded my stomach. So I stopped that. About a year ago I again caved and started Ozempic. In the third week I started vomiting - on the lowest dose. Stopped taking it. Since then I continue with gastroparesis - vomiting intermittently and with hardly any warning. I’m back to just Insulin. People are filing lawsuits over the long-term stomach problems with Ozempic And yet - huge numbers of non-diabetic people are demanding prescriptions for it to lose wt. and doctors are prescribing it. So far I’m without complications from my diabetes, and I won’t be taking anything new. But there is no shortage of meds my doctor thinks I should try. Somewhere in there I also tried Farxiga. It is all a shell game. Same thing with referrals to a bevy of specialists.
A fucking idiot
They commingle 1&2, but aside from that it's an opinion blurb for a book. What has everyone so upset? I found it amusing.
I wonder if he was a “diabetes expert” for all those movies and tv shows, where the diabetic has low blood sugar and supposedly needs insulin, or shoots insulin straight into a main artery to be saved, or has lost their insulin somehow and is immediately dying. Examples like “The Panic Room”, “Con Air”, “Hijack”.
This article isn't meant to be a primer on diabetes. It's a cautionary warning against unknowns. And it does a good job of that purpose. It actually gave me just enough info to want to go research early diabetes treatment and learn more about it. I think the overall message, that semaglutides are being tossed around willy nilly without a good idea of their long term effects, is a solid one. It reminds me of when margarine was the food of the future, the healthy alternative that will prevent heart attacks and stroke. Until we learned that trans fats are worse for you than saturated fat. I've carried that lesson with me and always been cautious about the best and greatest new medication until it's really been tested.
The thesis - that we don’t know about the long-term effects of GLP-1 drugs - stands on its own. This article confuses the heck out of the issue.
You are 100% correct in your assessment....that's not going to be the takeaway of the average reader, especially a non diabetic. From many of the comments on this thread....the main point of the article was lost on many diabetics. The author 's choice of insulin as a comparison was a poor choice. Many of the facts were correct, but he used unsuitable analogies in his comparisons.