Today, on World Diabetes Day, it’s time to set the record straight: The cause of Type 2 diabetes and its precursor, insulin resistance, is saturated fats. They muck up your cells and the ability of your cells to use insulin.  

Choo choo on that!

Your brain and heart and other muscles burn glucose for energy.  Normally, in response to glucose in your blood, the pancreas releases insulin–a hormone that acts like a freight train and ushers the glucose into cells.  

But saturated fats in your blood get into your muscle cells and block them from being able to accept glucose, the freight. Thus, glucose starts puddling in your blood.  Sugars, from the foods you eat, keep deepening those puddles.

In response to all the glucose in your blood, the pancreas work harder and harder to release insulin, but the insulin train has nowhere to go.  It can’t deliver the goods, the glucose, to cells. That’s the state of insulin resistance–in which your cells are resistant to the action of insulin. Eventually, the pancreas poops out–and that’s diabetes,Type 2, the kind caused by what you eat. 

With all the brouhaha over saturated fats, little has been said about the research showing saturated fats initiate insulin resistance and diabetes. You can read more about it from Dr. Michael Greger, author of “How Not to Die,” starting here or here–or you can read some of the scientific papers here and here.

While it’s been long known that Type 2 diabetes increases the risk of getting and of dieing from cardiovascular disease, what do insulin resistance and diabetes have to do with cancer?  That connection is also becoming clear. 

The next time you see a stick of butter, imagine it sitting in your cells. Butter is virtually all fat–and rich in palmitate, a type of saturated fat that may be particularly harmful.  (Palmitate gets turned into ceramides, fats implicated in the development of insulin resistance.) Might ghee be contributing to India’s epidemic of diabetes? 

Today, on World Diabetes Day, let’s spread the word that butter is not back--and that saturated fats have no good business in our anti-cancer diets. All aboard!