Well, I know you've heard this gazillion times and you've believed it all through your life. I'm sorry to break it to you that it's not true.
And No, you've not believed a lie but have mixed up the facts with myths. And I'm here to help you out of this muddy clay.
You've probably come to associate checking "blood sugar levels" with diagnostic test for diabetes and you're not wrong but "blood sugar" doesn't equate to sugary food in the blood. Hear me out!
The "Sugar" here doesn't refer to something necessary "sweet" but refers to carbohydrate molecules that the body can absorb and make use of as energy.
So, while "sugary" food and unhealthy eating habits can be RISK FACTORS they are not ultimately the culprits for the cause of diabetes.
So what then causes diabetes?
Diabetes basically is a group of metabolic disorders in which there is elevated level of glucose ( blood "sugar") due to the inability of the body to produce insulin or resistance to insulin or both.
In simple terms, diabetes is the name for the group of things that go wrong when there's elevated level of glucose which your body couldn't process for use either due to absence of insulin or your body not responding to insulin as it should.
So the culprit here isn't the sugar as glucose but rather INSULIN.
See it this way, that the glucose is only sewage that's stuck because the Soakaway is blocked.
So what's insulin? It's an hormone, a protein in your body that regulates body functions. And the work of insulin is like a gateman, it functions to help glucose (blood sugar) enter into the cell where it can be used.
So when Insulin, our gateman, is not being produced at all or the body isn't responding to it as it should then glucose gets stuck in the blood and your body goes a-wire! And the problem doesn't end with the glucose stuck in the blood, it spirals into a lot of systems dysfunction.
So absence or relative non-functioning INSULIN is the underlying cause for diabetes and not just sugar in the blood.
Caveat : that the problem is insulin not sugar doesn't take away the fact that you should eat healthy and responsibly. As I mentioned earlier unhealthy eating is a RISK FACTOR for diabetes. That is, it can make you likely to come down with diabetes in correlation with other factors too.
References:
Galicia-Garcia U, Benito-Vicente A, Jebari S, et al. Pathophysiology of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus. Int J Mol Sci. 2020;21(17):6275. doi:10.3390/ijms21176275.
Available at: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Tokarz VL, MacDonald PE, Klip A. The cell biology of systemic insulin function. J Cell Biol. 2018;217(7):2273-2289. doi:10.1083/jcb.201802095.
Available at: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
