Pollution May Increases Diabetes Risk

Traditionally it was believed that eating right and exercising was the perfect way to get rid of diabetics. But a new study reveals that that this might not be enough for those who are exposed to chemicals in the environment.

In a startling disclosure scientists have found a link between DDE, a chemical produced as the body breaks down DDT* and diabetes. Mary Turyk, a lead researcher and epidemiologist at the university of Illinois, Chicago says that even though DDT has been banned in the United States and has not been used in decades, its metabolism is found in almost everyone in the country.

Since the early 1990s researchers have been monitoring a group of Great Lake charter boats captains and fishermen among others to prove the questionable link between environmental pollutants and diabetics. Their objective was to understand the implications of eating fish tainted with pollutants and other chemicals. The researchers have written in the July issue of environmental health perspectives regarding the consistent dose related association of DDE with diabetes. They have observed that higher the concentration of DDE in the blood , higher was the chance of developing diabetes. Also, these pollutants, as they lay unobserved in the environment, caused greater damage as they “moved up the food chain”. These studies were conducted on a group of 471 adults, including 36 people already diagnosed with diabetes. It concluded that the degree of diabetes was unrelated to amount of fish consumed or the exposure to other type of chemical pollutants but solely dependent on the DDE concentration.

This study has come as a shock to many a people. Prominent among them is David O. Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University of Albany in New York. Though he was not involved in the study, he feels that this research has only strengthened claims of links between diabetes and pollution. That it has made people now more conscious of the environment around them and its implications for diabetes, has become quite plain for all to see, he believes. He has noted that the prevalence of environment pollutants and its varying presence in geographically widespread areas are the common causes of people getting sick when they move to more industrially developed places.

Diabetes is caused by inability of the body to produce insulin, which lets glucose enter the cells. According to American diabetes association, more than 23 million Americans or eight percent of the population are diabetic and this percentage has increased from eight to 13.5 percent from 2005 to 2007. Scientists all over the globe have now started accepting that the role of pollutants in diabetes is very much significant.

Henry Kahn, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Diabetes Translation said that most of the studies on the causes of type 2 diabetes have been focusing on the lifestyles while the role of environment has been largely overlooked till now. There are also other biochemists who are waking up to this startling news. Oliver Jones, a biochemist at the University of Cambridge has noted that the implications on the study of diabetes could be very huge if pollutants could indeed be proved to be a certain cause of diabetes. He disagrees with the views of Carpenter on people, and instead says that a richer diet and a flamboyant lifestyle are the causes of diabetes in people moving to more industrially developed areas.

Another evidence supporting the fact came from a study of 2000 people conducted by the U.S. Center for disease control and prevention, that found people with the highest level of pollutants were 38 times more susceptible to diabetes. But critics all along have been mocking at the claim saying that diabetes breaks down the chemicals very slowly and that is exactly why they carry more of them. But Turyk, sharing principal research duties with Henry Anderson of the Wisconsin Division of Public Health and Victoria Persky at the University of Illinois-Chicago, hammered that theory by showing that there was no difference in DDE metabolism rates between diabetics and non-diabetics.

Scientists now are of the firm opinion that pollution seems to disrupt the way genes produce proteins and these basically change the entire biochemistry of the cell.

*Note : DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) - one of the most well-known synthetic pesticides. First synthesized in 1874, it is a chemical with a controversial history.