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Nutrition & Product Information
Diabetes Mellitus & Dairy Food Consumption
Introduction
The disease, diabetes mellitus, is a collection of diseases that have in common a disturbed insulin-glucose relationship. It is not a new disease, for it was described by the ancient Egyptians in their papyrus and by the early Greek physicians. In fact the word, diabetes, was given to the disorder by the Greek physician, Cappadocia, to indicate a disease characterized by the passage of large volumes of urine. The word, mellitus, was added later by Willis to indicate the presence of sugar in the urine. One of the very early tests for diabetes mellitus was to pour some of the patient’s urine on the ground to see if ants were attracted to it. It was not until 1897, when Minkowski surgically removed the pancreas from a dog, that diabetes mellitus was discovered to be a disorder involving this gland. Two decades later, Banting and Best showed that the devastating effects of pancreatic malfunction could be reversed with the daily injection of a crude pancreatic extract containing insulin. Over the next eighty years, scientists learned not only how to treat the disease but also how to diagnose and manage it in its various forms. Progress has been made in identifying genetic aberrations that associate with the disease. Indeed, progress has also been made in both the pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic management of the disease.
The challenge for the coming years is to be able to correctly diagnose the disease before it is clinically present and then to prevent the disease from occurring. The correct diagnosis will probably be genetically based, while the prevention will probably be focused on lifestyle choices that include diet and physical activity. This paper addresses these issues with a review of our current knowledge about the genetics of diabetes and its management. Also included is a discussion of the Finnish hypothesis that early cow’s milk exposure of infants serves to trigger autoimmune diabetes. Although this hypothesis has been shown invalid, there are suggestions that other as yet unknown diet-gene interactions occur that could affect the development of diabetes. This in turn suggests that not only could diet affect the time course of diabetes, but also that diet strategies could intervene. Research is needed to support this proposition.
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