Free Republic

Disorders of the immune system are on the rise everywhere thanks to the global popularity of the so-called Western diet. Autoimmune diseases including type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis have spiked in recent decades, according to scientists James Lee and Carola Vineusa at London’s Francis Crick Institute. Lee and Vineusa have devoted their study to investigating the cause of such illness, which they believe can be blamed on the recent pervasiveness of fast foods, which “lack certain important ingredients.” “Numbers of autoimmune cases began to increase about 40 years ago in the West,” Lee...

How the pandemic laid bare America’s diabetes crisis COVID-19 has torn a particularly lethal path through the 1 in 10 Americans with diabetes, including many who never caught the virus. That's because when the pandemic hit, people with the chronic disease were already in worse shape than in years. It took the deadly disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic to expose a deeper, more intractable U.S. public-health crisis: For more than a decade, the world’s richest nation has been losing the battle against diabetes. Long before the pandemic, Kate Herrin was among the millions of Americans struggling to control their diabetes....

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A 15-center study of 175 patients with poorly-controlled type 2 diabetes in JAMA found that continuous glucose monitoring, compared to blood glucose meter monitoring, or finger pricking, significantly decreased their hemoglobin A1C over eight months (-1.1% versus -0.16%, respectively.) Although the benefits of continuous glucose monitoring for patients with diabetes has been demonstrated before, the benefits have only been well studied in patients with type 1 diabetes or patients with type 2 treated with multiple daily insulin injections, referred to as prandial insulin. Study author Rodica Busui, M.D., Ph.D., also the vice chair of clinical research...

People with diabetes account for a staggering 40 percent of those who have died from COVID-19 in the US, according to the American Diabetes Association ... the risk of hospitalization and death related to COVID being six to 12 times higher for people with diabetes ... Alarmingly, the ADA has also said that cases of type 2 diabetes have almost doubled in children since the pandemic.

I have returned from a much-needed 12-day break from the news, returning to California and finding little has changed from the mask-mad mandates that have been imposed for over a year. Reviewing recent reports, I have noted that our media seems to be relatively silent on a factor that may be significant in assessing risk of hospitalization or death from COVID-19: obesity. For example, [SNIP] two new, large studies from England and Mexico provide new details on obesity as a risk factor for poor COVID-19–related outcomes. In the first study, published yesterday in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, University of...

A typical Western high-fat diet can increase the risk of painful disorders common in people with conditions such as diabetes or obesity, according to a groundbreaking paper… Moreover, changes in diet may significantly reduce or even reverse pain from conditions causing either inflammatory pain -- such as arthritis, trauma or surgery -- or neuropathic pain, such as diabetes. The novel finding could help treat chronic-pain patients by simply altering diet or developing drugs that block release of certain fatty acids in the body. In the new paper, Dr. Boyd and his colleagues used multiple methods in both mice and humans...