I happened upon the following article on Diabetes 2 epidemies and its connection with thrifty genes
nature.com
Sort of frightening, the answer to the question in the subtitle: Why is the prevalence of type 2 diabetes mellitus now exploding in most populations, but not in Europeans?
A corollary of this view based on Europe's food history is that, several centuries before the advent of modern medicine, Europeans, like modern Nauruans, should have undergone an epidemic in type 2 diabetes that resulted from the new reliability of adequate food supplies and eliminated most diabetes-prone bearers of the thrifty genotype. However, there would have been big differences between that postulated earlier European epidemic and the well-documented modern epidemics among Nauruans and among so many other peoples today. In the modern epidemics, abundant and continually reliable food arrived suddenly, within a decade for the Nauruans and within just a month for the Yemenite Jews. The result was a sharply peaked surge in prevalence to 20–50% that occurred right under the eyes of modern diabetologists. That increase will probably wane quickly, as individuals with the thrifty genotype become eliminated by natural selection within a mere generation or two. In contrast, Europe's food abundance would have increased gradually over the course of several centuries, and the result, between the 1400s and 1700s, would have been a slow rise in type 2 prevalence long before there were diabetologists to take note.
RegZ
dj
PS: Oh man, how enticingly easy it is just to copy and paste and not to have rephrase or remember what has been read... Are we - given Google & Co - possibly turning intellectually in the equivalent of the halflietrate person at the cash register ("enter the amount of cash received, then press change-due button"). End of sad rant.
PPS: the next nation to go down the tubes due to the above will be (Maurice? you still there?) North Koreans. |
