The smarter way to look at it: Diabetes increases the chances of dementia. It's diabetes that's causing an unnatural increase. Rhe drug is simply a catalyst for something closer to normal. Obesity at it's current rate, while socially normalized, is from an evolutionary standpoint abnormal.
The article mentions that this effect was seen in only the cohort taking one of two prevalent diabetes medications.
For your interpretation to be accurate, you’d need to also show that the other popular medicine doesn’t work for diabetes type 2 treatment.
FWIW, the last line of the article is a dismissal from a UK doctor saying that this would make the diabetes drug better than any existing Alzheimer treatments, and suggesting that there’s a confounding variable in the study instead.
"For your interpretation to be accurate, you’d need to also show that the other popular medicine doesn’t work for diabetes type 2 treatment."
This is not true. It's possible that there are multiple effects of type 2 diabetes, with multiple drugs that treat the main factor (sugar levels), but with a subset of the drugs affecting other factors (hormones, cellular activities, something else) that influence dementia.
I had read that too, but while those Alzheimer’s teams pivot over the next 10 years for their new research and drug approvals, the thing that treats insulin and glucose processing helps prevent diabetes and dementia
No actually, I'm not. Instead, my baseline is the historic norm, the evolutionary norm. I don't jump to the conclusion of normalizing diabetes and then come up with some throw-more-pills-at-it theory.
In other words, how effective is this "cure" vs no diabetes at all? *That* is the question.
From an evolutionary standpoint, animals cycle from obese to slim year round. Obesity is normal in autumn. Being slim is normal in spring/early summer. Food state wise we are in a eternal autumn.
We are not defending obesity, we are advocating for a balanced view, while you are busy with your little crusade.
My suggestion is to look at old black/white tribal photos of natives. They do not fullfill your beauty standards, but they lived normal sustenance lifes.
And yes, the woman and men have bellies. Not huge ones, but noticeable ones.
Same thing in the animal kingdom.
The dominant monkey in a harem, besides the normal hormonal dominance meat-mountain bloat, usually has a belly.
Our beauty standard is met by animals in distress, being pushed into marginal territories. Healthy is, somewhere in the middle, not on either side of the isles of madness.
If you are overweight, you need to take responsibility and change your lifestyle.
Of course, everyone instinctively knows this even if they want to use mental gymnastics to explain why it is OK. Alcoholics, drug addicts, etc are defensive too and have many excuses at the ready for why their behavior is acceptable.
In the end, however, reality will hit hard and five dollar words aren’t going to save the obese and those with unhealthy lifestyles from sickness and early death.
Not true. Bears live about 25 years. 35-40 years in captivity. I don’t think they’re normalizing obesity upthread, they’re merely pointing out that in nature accumulation of significant quantities of subcutaneous and visceral fat is normal, as are periods of starvation that we no longer experience.
Correct - I wasn't trying to normalize obesity upthread, at all.
Bears are an example that shows very clearly it's normal for animals in nature to become very much "not lean" to survive, and the drive to put on fat stores is probably much broader in nature than animals that hibernate to survive winter.
What's unique about humans is that we've engineered our environment to the point that most of us no longer suffer long stretches of being unfed or underfed to strip the excess fat stores off of us.
Some people are clearly better than others at fighting the behavior evolution has programmed into them. It's not good for them today, but at the same time that drive for survival is what kept their ancestors alive.
Of course we don't, but then again I think bears were just thrown in as an (extreme) example. As I read the thread before that, the point was that most animals' weights vary on an annual cycle, fattened up during summer-autumn and slimmer after the winter. Which seems fairly uncontroversial to me.
From an evolutionary standpoint, like bears, we only managed to survive long enough for our offspring to have offspring, which is all that matters for evolution.
I never understood why these references are being made regarding health.
Bears aren’t healthy. Bears don’t live long. Ancient people weren’t healthy, their diets weren’t healthy and they had lots of untreated issues as well.
I supose quite a few bears live quite long lives -- for being bears.
> Ancient people weren’t healthy, their diets weren’t healthy and they had lots of untreated issues as well.
As far as I've gathered from (pop-sci summaries of fairly recent-ish) research, people in prehistoric and pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were on average at least as healty as -- and often healthier than -- people in later agricultural societies, from the Bronze and Iron Ages through antiquity, the Middle Ages and Renaissance, up until at least the early Modern Age and quite possibly through to our days of (relative, unequally-distributed) affluence and its concomitant recent global obesity.
This only really applies to some animals which developed in moderate climate.
Most primates including us humans are tropical and subtropical creatures, which didn't face classical winters until relatively recently. The Neanderthals did, for a considerable amount of time, and their physiology might have been different, but the Neanderthals were also developed enough to protect themselves using clothing and shelters, and possibly store food, so physiological adjustments might not have been necessary.
Modern humans are basically Africans adapted to ~ Kenyan climate, though. (Yeah I know about the Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture.)
The smarter way to comment online: Read the article before commenting on how to best understand it. As the other reader mentioned, that's not what the article says.
That is, the medication doesn't improve anything per se. The problem is obesity and diabetes. The medication does not perform better than these not being present at all.
The presume diabetes - sans T1 - is a norm is false if not dangerous. In other words, "Sure just throw more meds at it" is not a narrative anyone should be comfortable with.
