Curated Paper 1

So I have diabetes, which is a metabolic disorder, I was just thinking about how I hope I can learn more about diabetes, because while I do have the disease, I haven’t used what I have learned in my undergraduate degree in order to further understand it more, so I think that would be pretty cool if we just dive into it literally at the very end of my undergrad degree. I asked a question about where the glycogen is stored and it seems it is stored in muscles, I just think that is cool because whenever I exercise, my blood sugar just absolutely drops so I am sure there is some sort of connection there, pretty cool. Recently, my blood sugar has been having a mind of its own due to the stress of having a dental school interview, so I could absolutely relate that to what we are talking about when it comes to ayurveda. My body is absolutely out of balance, so when I inevitably inject too much insulin, that throws my body out of balance but the other way. The topic we discussed in class made me ask myself who in my family has diabetes, and the answer is absolutely nobody so I think T1D would classify as an “acquired disease.”

When we actually talked about diabetes itself. I have heard of beta cells, I believe these are the cells that are generally my issue or at least that is what I’ve heard online. If these cells are antagonistic, that should be self regulating, I don’t know what happened to my beta cells, they must just be dead as well. We also talked about endocrine disruptors which, and that topic was kind of scary, lots of stuff can disrupt people’s hormones. I think it's crazy that we don’t really know what some disruptors actually do, and I think it is even crazier that we don’t know if stuff is even a disruptor in the first place.  I remember asking why high blood glucose levels inevitably cause high blood pressure so I did some research. I have heard this so I knew it was probably true. I initially thought that since high blood sugar can cause stiff blood vessels, that stiffness could potentially not let blood vessels do stuff that blood vessels do like expand and contract. I found that that idea I had was actually correct so that was pretty cool, there was another pathway BP can rise due to blood sugar, and it is through just having more sodium.

I was curious if a person can get both types of diabetes, I remember “researching” this subject when I was younger and less educated in biology. From what I can understand I don’t think we can get insulin resistance from insulin we don’t even produce ourselves, I know that would be terrible. After researching it, apparently we can get literally both types of diabetes. So our body wouldn’t produce insulin in the first place, then when injected, it wouldn’t be effective. This would not be a very good situation for people, but insulin resistance is kind of a spectrum, it doesn’t just start and suddenly you’re unable to utilize all insulin. But I am very glad this isn’t as common of a problem as just either type of diabetes by themselves. 

So, concerning the economics of diabetes, I can definitely personally relate to this. What I can put into this conversation is type 1 diabetes is not optimal if you do not have insurance. Constant glucose monitors help make diabetes much more manageable, but it costs about 300 dollars for a month’s supply of constant glucose monitors. Without insurance that is totally unaffordable, at least for me it is. I need diabetic supplies, insulin, and insulin pump application units cost money unfortunately, these companies do need to “keep the lights on” but there is no way a couple pieces of plastic are a couple hundred dollars, of course that’s just my opinion. It just feels like I am kind of trapped unless I am making a stupid amount of money to just buy these supplies out of pocket, because if insurance isn’t paying for this stuff then I am literally just going to have to buy it or I have to go without a pump, which is still absolutely doable. 

I have learned that physical activity is down as of late, and I believe this is absolutely a factor of health in the general public. From what I have seen, exercise is one of the most important factors of health. Before, my view of exercise was limited, I would normally say that everyone has time to exercise even if it is for 10 minutes a day. But for someone who has a serious health problem in this ever increasingly expensive world, trying to add exercise to that mix sounds like some tough tasks to balance. Not even to mention that food is generally worse for people than it used to be, in my opinion. To test this, just take a trip to Walmart and see how much some chicken or beef is, some protein is extremely expensive, but kraft mac and cheese is like one dollar. This absolutely affects the general population’s health, as economic factors are getting worse, since 2007, the cost of diabetes in the US has risen by 41%. At the same time, we are also seeing that people’s general health is also getting worse. No wonder why the leading case of death is heart disease. I think exercise is basically this same conversation as well. The common question arises, “Do we have a chance without exercise?” I personally think we as human beings need exercise, I know I have talked about how it can be difficult for some people to exercise. Unfortunately, I believe that no matter how difficult it is to get some activity in, not exercising will be detrimental to anyone’s health. 

So why haven’t we improved health if we know more than ever now? There have actually been scientific papers written on the subject that state that technology has made tasks that were once more difficult, less difficult and time consuming. And I think this applies to health as well because I don’t think people are getting up and moving as much, but apparently according to science “it is not laziness.” So then why is diabetes getting more prevalent? A quick trip down google scholar will tell you that yes in fact, both type 1 and 2 diabetes are becoming more prevalent, but why? The National Institutes of Health released a paper stating that environmental factors are increasing, but they don’t know exactly what those factors are. This is where I can take my guess, I believe it is our ever decreasingly nutritional diet. That, and the fact that I think type 1 diabetics are able to get more access to care than before, and having children is becoming more viable than before to type 1 diabetics.

I am currently taking immunology and that class emphasizes the fact that our immune system does not simply attack everything that is not our own body. If that were true, then the first thing everyone in that class thinks of, is our gut microbiome, without our biome we would have some serious struggles trying to digest literally anything. If people figured out all the way back in 1875 that the microbiome existed and functions, then it was probably pretty important and prominent. Whether or not we think the microbiome is important, it is absolutely prominent, as our microbiome outnumber our own cells. But everything kind of points to it being important, such as vitamin K production. From day 0 we are exposed to outside pathogens, we have just recently found that the placenta is actually not sterile. So starting from the very beginning, the decisions our parents make as we are literally infants change what our microbiome will be like. Even the method at which we are born into the world changes something as important as our microbiome, which really does promote the fact that our body really is in a balancing act. And our microbiome can change stuff like what we are allergic to, or even our risk of heart disease. Formula is missing some sort of components that mothers milk has, so human milk basically selects for a particular type of bacteria, which suggests our microbiome is kind of picked out on purpose, it's not just randomly assigned to us. 

When you just simply change the bacteria in the microbiome, it has direct connections to the nervous system, and even direct connections to the immune system. So basically any change to the microbiome could possibly change lots of different things in the body. This relates back to ayurveda, which essentially says that the body is always in a balance. We can see that the gut microbiome can affect the rest of our body, even in the mind. The gut-brain axis is a communication from our digestive system, and it directly links brain function to the function of our digestive system, also pointing to the fact that we are always in a balance. They literally took the microbiome from a fat mouse, then put it into a sterile thin mouse and it would make thin mouse fat. I wanted to dig into this study and it did in fact happen which is crazy because we do not learn anything about our gut microbiome in a class like biochemistry. I did not know it had such an important impact in the overall metabolism process. I initially thought that maybe it increased the amount of food that the mouse would want to eat, but apparently they ate the exact same diet, with the exact amount of food. Essentially, what they think happened was the mice did not break the laws of thermodynamics, but instead, the new microbiome just forced the mouse to use pathways that stored more calories. Research suggests that 10 percent of the total increased risk of heart disease associated with eating red meat come from the microbial change. I also found it interesting that poultry and fish do not change our microbiome as red meats do, and they also are not as strongly linked to atherosclerosis. One would think that our gut microbiome is completely separate from something like atherosclerosis, but apparently it is not. This really goes to show that we truly are always in a balance. All of this makes me wonder why we haven’t done a lot of other research on how to change our gut microbiome for the better.