Half of America will be facing diabetes by 2020

[perseverance]

Nice try, but I'm white. Try that racist comments against someone else.

I wasn't referring to race.

I believe we have a case of the race card being played and I do hope you had time to read the links that Outsider posted, though I suspect you ignored that as you have bee proven wrong.

 

[Alle_Gory]

I believe we have a case of the race card being played and I do hope you had time to read the links that Outsider posted, though I suspect you ignored that as you have bee proven wrong.

Did you? They directly prove my point especially the second link. It goes on to talk about how a healthy adult can develop diabetes if there is a hereditary link.

 

[perseverance]

Did you? They directly prove my point especially the second link. It goes on to talk about how a healthy adult can develop diabetes if there is a hereditary link.

They can also develop it without a hereditary link.

You can get heart disease whilst being an active person, just because someone appears in shape doesn't mean these illnesses evade them. Next you'll be saying only people who smoke can contract lung cancer.

There are high risk categories and low risk categories, both can contract it, but chances of a slim, healthy woman contracting is radically reduced to say an overweight woman.

 

[Alle_Gory]

You can get heart disease whilst being an active person, just because someone appears in shape doesn't mean these illnesses evade them.

Good point. I agree on that.

But when I mean healthy, I mean a completely healthy individual. Appearances don't really matter for anything when it comes to disease.

 

[backbreaker]

lol, holy crap. AIDS/HIV has been around for a LONG time

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/dec/02/hiv-aids-research


2. Genetics and predisposition to certain diseases, has alot to do with disease. I have the trait for sickle cell. I know this for a fact. I don't have it per say, but if I were to mate with a woman who had it, our child would have sickle cell My uncle has it full blown. This is a black people trait that has evolved over thousands of years. No different than white people are predispositioned to hemophilia. Try reading Germs, Guns and Steel by Jarod Diamond.

This is why I am such a big proponent of pocking up a book outside of a pick up or lay guide. my gosh guys. all the game in the world isn't going to help you are if you are just ignorant.

 

[Alle_Gory]

2. Genetics and predisposition to certain diseases, has alot to do with disease. I have the trait for sickle cell. I know this for a fact. I don't have it per say, but if I were to mate with a woman who had it, our child would have sickle cell My uncle has it full blown. This is a black people trait that has evolved over thousands of years. No different than white people are predispositioned to hemophilia. Try reading Germs, Guns and Steel by Jarod Diamond.

This is why I am such a big proponent of pocking up a book outside of a pick up or lay guide. my gosh guys. all the game in the world isn't going to help you are if you are just ignorant.

I always thought these diseases were race neutral. More info? This sounds interesting.

 

[Rogue]

Scientific American magazine, along with other scientific news outlets, are reporting on a new study which shows, "A statistical analysis of more than 20,000 animals suggests that the obesity epidemic is spreading to family pets, wild animals living in close proximity to humans, and animals housed in research centers--perhaps indicating that environmental factors beyond diet and exercise are at least partly to blame for expanding waistlines."

David Allison, a biostatistician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and lead author on a study published online November 24 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, stumbled across the trend while looking for a relationship between body weight and longevity in a population of marmosets housed at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center in Madison. He decided to take a closer look. He and his colleagues examined changes in weight in a total of 24 populations (12 male and 12 female), drawn from 8 different species, including primates and rodents used for research, domestic cats and dogs, and urban feral rats. About half of the data in the analysis comes from rodents that had been used between 1982 and 2005 in the control arms of studies run by the National Toxicology Program, which assesses safe exposure levels for various chemicals.

Another science magazine, The Scientist, expounds:

All 24 populations of animals, which ranged from primates housed in research facilities to feral rats living in the greater Baltimore area, showed significant increases in body weight. Average body weights of captive chimpanzees increased at a rate of 33 percent each decade, and 9 percent per decade in captive marmosets. Laboratory mice got 12 percent fatter every ten years, laboratory rats did by 3 percent; the average body mass of Baltimore's feral rats increased by almost 7 percent each decade. And house pets were no exception, either. The average weight of cats increased by almost 10 percent each decade, while dogs' weights increased by 3 percent every decade.

Not only did body weight increase significantly, but so did the chances than an animal would be obese. In 23 out of the 24 populations, animals were more likely to be obese -- defined as weight above the 85th percentile at the initial time-point -- at the second time-point than at the first.

What's more, the increased body weights and increased likelihood of obesity were found even in animals whose diets and physical activity levels were known to be the same throughout the study period. So if dietary changes and energy imbalance weren't responsible for the rise in obesity, said Allison, it may be some environmental factor.

"If we're seeing these trends in other mammals, it shows that there must be another explanation" besides the main culprits of inertia and poor diet, Kuk said.

What is the explanation, we don't know. The study wasn't rigorous enough to evaluate causation. But the speculation is there may be environmental toxins from human activity which are affecting the endocrine system.

backbreaker:
Genetics and predisposition to certain diseases, has a lot to do with disease. I have the trait for sickle cell. I know this for a fact. I don't have it per say, but if I were to mate with a woman who had it, our child would have sickle cell My uncle has it full blown. This is a black people trait that has evolved over thousands of years.

Alle_Gory:
I always thought these diseases were race neutral. More info? This sounds interesting.

It's an evolutionary adaptation related to malaria. To quote from the science textbook Essentials of Physical Anthropology from my personal library:

With such obviously harmful effects, it is surprising to find the sickle-cell allele so frequent in some populations. The highest allele frequencies are found in western and central African populations, reaching levels close to 20 percent; values are also moderately high in some Greek and Asiatic Indian populations. How do we explain such a phenomenon? Obviously, the allele originated from a simple mutation, but why did it increase in frequency?

The answer lies in yet another kind of disease, one that exerts enormous selective pressure. In those areas of the world where the sickle-cell allele is found in highest frequency, malaria is also found. Caused by a single-celled parasite, this debilitating infectious disease is transmitted to humans by mosquitoes. In areas that are endemically infected, many individuals suffer sharply lower reproductive success, owing to high infant mortality rates or to lowered vitality as adults.

Such a geographical correlation between malarial incidence and distribution of the sickle-cell allele is indirect evidence of a biological correlation. Further confirmation was provided by British biologist A.C. Allison in the 1950s. Volunteers from the Luo tribe of eastern Africa with known genotypes were injected with the malarial parasite. The ethics concerning human subjects would preclude such experimentation today; even when the original study was conducted, its justification was questionable. A short time following infection, results showed that heterozygous carriers of the sickle-cell allele were much more resistant to malarial infection than the homozygous "normals." Apparently, carriers resist infection because their red blood cells provide a less conducive environment for the malarial parasite to reproduce itself. As a result, the parasite often dies before widely infecting the body of a carrier. But for the homozygous "normals," the infection usually persists.

A genetic trait (such as sickle-cell trait) that provides a reproductive advantage in certain environments is a clear example of natural selection in action among human populations. The precise evolutionary mechanism in the sickle-cell example is termed a balanced polymorphism.

But backbreaker may be wrong about race. According to the University of Cincinnati, "This explains why, despite our racial assumptions about sickle cell, the disease is for example rare in South Africa but prevalent in Greece. Sickle cell does not follow dark skin. Sickle cell follows malaria."