Our chief scientific advisor for this series of articles is Mark F. McCarty. He has published widely and is a science advisor to many nutritional supplement companies and labs. We will look to Mark for solutions as this series on diabetes unfolds.

The Life Extension Foundation reports that everyone with sugar problems are also at higher risk of developing life-threatening conditions ranging from heart disease and stroke to blindness nerve damage, depression and kidney disease.

The American Diabetes Association warns that over 17 million Americans are diabetic and an additional 16 million are pre-diabetic. Taken together, this large group of people, all of whom have sugar handling problems, are more than 10% of the population. It is alarming that diabetes has been listed as the 6th leading cause of death on death certificates in 1999 and the ranks of those with diabetes is growing as our collective girth has grown.

Most of the public is unaware of the insidious manner in which type 2 diabetes destroys tissues throughout the body. It is, in many ways, another silent killer.

Type 2 diabetes, the most common form, is often associated with and promoted by being overweight, in which the insulin-secreting beta cells of the pancreas are intact but no longer functioning right. This condition is or was hardly ever seen in many Third World cultures prior to the incursion of Western dietary practices and relatively sedentary lifestyles.

McCarty’s straightforward view of the genesis of type 2 diabetes, the most common type associated with overweight, is now emerging from clinical and animal studies of this disease. Simply put, this disorder may result from FAT POISONING. Too much fat in the diet, too much fat stored in adipose cells, too much fat circulating in the bloodstream, and too much fat stored in skeletal muscle fibers and other key tissues.

As a result of this continual excessive exposure to fat, several key organs in the body that regulate blood sugar and blood fats fail to function properly.