United States: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has already brought attention to a health problem which may be affecting many Americans like chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and heart disease. Almost every family knows someone with one of these conditions.
A new study suggests that one of the main causes of these diseases might be the food we eat, supporting RFK Jr.’s idea that our diet could be a big factor in causing these health issues.
More specifically, what we are eating and how we are consuming it?
In a study released in Cell Wednesday, biologist Richard Young concludes that consuming too much added sugar brings traffic jam into cells.
As reported by the USA TODAY, young also believes that it is these traffic jams which causes many of the chronic diseases.
Normally, any sugar we consume in all foods whether they are healthy or not, is metabolized into the fuel that supplies the body with energy.
However, if instead of a normal healthy meal with not a very large amount of nutrients, you have two Cokes alongside that, then you do not have this balance, Young added who is a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
This flood of sugar into the bloodstream challenges the capacity of pancreas to secrete adequate insulin to incapably break down the sugar and cells generate overly amounts of oxygen inside of them, which in turn, causes burning.
‘If you get very high levels of oxygen inside cells it damages the equipment,’ Young said.
We have known for many decades now that patients with chronic diseases have excessive production within the cells of these things known as reactive oxygen species. If we take natural production of reactive oxygen species which increases with age, that means chronic diseases are also naturally higher at old age.
But what has not been realized for some time, Young said, is whether this oxidative stress had thrown a switch causing damage to a single mechanism.
He ‒ and some of his colleagues ‒ now think he has found it.
None of us had any idea that there is, in fact, a fairly simple process,’ said Young, a researcher at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.