Kale and Coffee by Kevin Gianni

Author:Kevin Gianni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2015-06-09T16:00:00+00:00

A Para-Cyclist with a Rare Genetic Disorder Explains Everything

I’ve never met or spoken to Tom Staniford, but he seems like the type of guy I’d like. Tom was born with a rare genetic disorder called mandibular hypoplasia, or MDP syndrome, which doesn’t allow his body to store any fat. Only eight people in the world have it. Because of MDP, Tom’s face and body are literally skin and bones, his muscles are stiff, his hearing is bad, and he has diabetes. But these limitations haven’t slowed him down. He’s a competitive professional cyclist. In 2011, he won the British National Para-Cycling Circuit Race Championship in his class. Not so bad.

While taking a break from some research, I read about Tom in an article on the BBC website. I was surprised to find that this genetically skinny man has type 2 diabetes—a disease that mostly affects overweight people. How could this skinny cyclist get diabetes?

It’s no secret that eating too much sugar or too many carbs messes with your body’s blood sugar balance. Blood glucose, which is basically sugar in the blood, is required for you to survive. Too little and you die. Too much and you risk getting type 2 diabetes.

When you eat sugar or carbs, your body produces insulin, a hormone that helps your body absorb sugar from the blood and store it in your liver, muscles, and fat tissue. Too much sugar in the blood causes the pancreas to release a flood of insulin. When this occurs, two things happen. First, the body’s fat-burning capacity is switched off, so it can burn sugar as fuel. And then, because there is so much insulin in your bloodstream, your body stores too much sugar (which it converts to fat) and the glucose levels in your blood drop too low. This means you’ll need to eat more sugar to bring them back into balance. More sugar, more insulin, more fat, less blood sugar—it becomes a cycle. Type 2 diabetes comes along when your pancreas says I’m through with this roller coaster, gets tired, and slows production of insulin.

But what about those cultures that eat traditional diets that are high in carbs and don’t suffer from an epidemic of diabetes like we do? In his famous China Study, described as “the most comprehensive study of nutrition ever conducted,” T. Colin Campbell, a researcher at Cornell University, found that while the rural Chinese diet is approximately 80 percent carbs and only 10 percent fat and 10 percent protein, it is extremely healthy for them.1 They don’t suffer from the high incidence of diabetes that urban-dwelling Chinese, who eat a more Westernized diet, do. If sugar or carbs were causing problems for the rural Chinese, they would be the largest consumers of insulin shots in the world, but they’re not. So there must be another factor. What happens in Tom’s body tells us what it is.

The other factor is fat—specifically, fat in the bloodstream.

Since Tom can’t store fat, his blood is filled with it.

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