Eating a high carb and high sugar diet does not promote diabetes.

Eating a low carb diet does not reverse or prevent diabetes.

Shocking, I know. Here me out. The common and popular understanding about what is going on isn't quite right.

For the purposes of this discussion, I will define diabetes as an impairment to your ability to rapidly and effectively process blood glucose, should glucose happen to enter your blood stream.

You might have diabetes even if you eat a zero-carb diet. You wouldn't know. Because without eating sugars you can't tell if your body is good at processing those sugars. All the nasty symptoms and damage caused by diabetes will be absent while you don't eat sugars, which is great. But once you start eating sugars again you could find that your body cannot tolerate them.

Diabetes is caused by two things: (1) visceral fat that has invaded your pancreas, and (2) beta cells that are not very fat tolerant (this is genetically determined). If your pancreatic beta cells are not very fat tolerant, and you have a tendency to store fat viscerally, then you will become diabetic at perhaps a low body weight, maybe even at 25 BMI. You drew the short straw. Some people have very tolerant beta cells and store fat subcutaneously and can get up to massive BMIs without becoming diabetic. Everybody has a personal body weight over which they will become diabetic that is mostly genetically determined and not known to be changeable.

What happens with diabetes is that as the pancreas becomes more and more fatty, the beta cells can't tolerate the fattyness of the environment and stop behaving like beta cells. They don't die, they are still there, but they cease operation.

The good news is that if you lose weight, those beta cells will resume operation and your diabetes will be cured.

So going back to my initial statements, it isn't about carbs or fat or protein in your food. It is about total energy consumption, total body weight. Becuase your body converts excess carbs into fat, and it converts excess protein into fat too. And if you eat in excess, eventually your pancreas will become too fatty for your beta cells.

People think sugars/carbs cause diabetes probably because diabetics can't tolerate sugars. But carbs only cause diabetes if you eat them to excess, causing you to become overweight and your pancreas to become fatty. You can do this to yourself by overeating protein too.

People think a low-carb diet cures diabetes, but this is only if that diet causes you to lose weight below your diabetic threshold. It also happens to mask diabetes since you aren't eating sugars so you really can't tell if your beta cells are working or not while you are on the diet.

This post was informed by research done at Newcastle University.