Debunking diabetes misconceptions

A Post by: Ellaheh Gohari

November 23, 2022

In popular culture, we think of diabetes as that one disease you get when you have too much sugar. It is easily preventable, we’re told, if our diets are good and we exercise enough. Even as prevalence skyrockets (nearly 10% of all Americans have some form of diabetes), some people are still convinced that having diabetes is completely avoidable. As the daughter of a Type 1 diabetic, however, I know all too well how wrong that assumption is.

Type 2 diabetes, the most common type with about 90–95% of all diabetics having it, is what we generally think of when talking about the disease. For Type 2 diabetics, insulin, the hormone produced by our pancreas to help break down glucose, or sugar, into usable energy for our body, becomes less effective for a multitude of reasons; namely, the pancreas’s production of insulin simply cannot keep up with the demand. This is known as insulin resistance, where blood sugar rises due to the lack of adequate insulin production. High blood sugar, in turn, can lead to several problems such as kidney or heart disease.

Though type 2 diabetes can be devastating, it can luckily be managed largely independently. Keeping a good diet, exercising, and, of course, taking medication are all ways to help lower the risk of negative outcomes resulting from the high blood sugar associated with the condition.

What may be surprising to some is that type 2 diabetes has a strong genetic link. Indeed, parents with type 2 diabetes are likely to have kids that also develop it later in life. However, the environmental factors of the disease cannot be overstated: though DNA may make someone more susceptible than another to the disease, it is ultimately their choices and habits that will cause them to pass their genetically encoded “threshold,” as it were, that will result in insulin resistance.

On the other hand, type 1 diabetes — which my father has — is much more nebulous in its cause. Thought to be triggered by an autoimmune reaction in which the body attacks its own pancreas, type 1 diabetes often results in the complete lack of or severe reduction of insulin production. Unlike in type 2 diabetes, where the pancreas still produces a normal amount of insulin, just not enough to keep up with the amount the person’s cells require, the pancreas of a type 1 diabetic essentially loses all function, never to return. Taking insulin, thus, is an absolute requirement, as type 1 diabetics cannot survive long without this life-saving drug.

Nearly 8.4 million Americans — including about 1 million type 1 diabetics — use insulin regularly, making it an unacceptable tragedy that the cost of this drug has risen 600% in just two decades. Diabetics in other developed countries such as France or Sweden only have to pay an average of under $10 for access to insulin. In the United States, though, diabetics must pay on average $98.70 for the life-saving drug. For such a developed country, America is sorely lacking in this regard, a blemish on millions’ quality of life that must be rectified.

No one should have to choose between taking insulin or feeding their family, yet this is a scenario we see time and time again. For over a million Type 1 diabetics, insulin is not a choice, it is a matter of life or death. It is time for American drug companies to rethink the choices they make and lower the cost of insulin to an affordable amount.