What causes diabetes?

No one knows. Doctors traditionally point fingers at the pancreas, and say diabetes sets in when the beta cells in this organ wear out. They also say diabetes is incurable, which flies in the face of their own experience with gestational diabetes, a condition common among women about to give birth. That variety of the disease vanishes once they recover from the stress of childbirth. It is difficult to medically gauge stress, and to understand what someone is going through psychologically, so doctors completely ignore the emotional factor when they formulate theories and treatment plans.

In the last year or so, we have been hearing of bariatric surgery, in which doctors staple the intestine and reduce the amount of food it can hold. This is done to help obese people. Doctors are amazed this surgery has accidentally cured many patients of type 2 diabetes.

They have no clue how it happens, but are now offering it as treatment for diabetics. The surgery has many arguments going against it, but it has proved again that the origins of diabetes could lie elsewhere, and not in the pancreas.

We have also heard another theory this year: that diabetes is caused by neurological inflammation. Scientists found clusters of damaged neurons near the pancreas, and when they treated those in rats, the diabetes went away. Researchers seem to be able to cure diabetes routinely in rats, and diabetes in cats often "goes into remission", but doctors always say humans are not rats.

Gary Taubes, a journalist who deserves the Pulitzer for poring over medical tomes and research papers to expose fatal flaws in dietary research, believes fat does does not really make people fat. In his recent book Good Calories Bad Calories, he reports that given a choice, diabetic rats prefer to eat low carb. They bite into protein and fat, and shun carbohydrate. Lab rats apparently rid themselves of diabetic symptoms once they started out on a carb-free diet.

All of which gives hope that researchers will one day find the cure for this wretched, insidious disease. Epidemic is a word newspapers have started using when they talk about diabetes, and the problem is indeed sweeping the world, but in my experience, mainstream doctors know little about it, and peddle old dogmas with supreme confidence.