A health educator often finds great resistance trying to instill a sense of urgency in pre-diabetics and early diabetics. They know that diabetes is bad, but they are unaware that the treatment for diabetes, insulin, is also bad. Why? typically insulin causes weight gain during diabetic treatment.

Insulin both gives and takes. Without the life giving hormone, insulin, from the pancreas, humans couldn’t utilize sugar properly for any level of health or survival. We must use hormone replacement when our glands are unable to keep up with our needs. Insulin supplementation, however has not proven entirely free of side effects, the worst is probably insulin and weight gain. Obesity is one, if not the worst factor possible for the continuation of the diabetic state. What insulin gives, it takes away.

In no time insulin promotes weight gain. It does this by first stimulating appetite. Then it affects the metabolism adversely causing the body to accumulate fat.

The worst part about this is that good faith attempts at weight loss in diabetics is typically futile. Under eating and careful food selection does not work, or, if it does, it only works for a short while. Exercise, while healthy, does not improve the overall weight loss performance either.

Once again, is insulin doing as much harm as it is good. If the weight gain is undermining the usefulness of insulin how far are we ahead?

For many doctors, every attempt is made to postpone the use of insulin. Even so, in the end a large percentage of people eventually end up requiring insulin. Unfortunately, a number of other doctors unappreciated the obesity problems with insulin, and are quick to apply this remedy.

If the side effects related to the treatment of diabetes were better known by the public, especially related to insulin, then learning they were pre-diabetic, or borderline diabetic would mean more to them. It’s likely they would put more effort into reversing the looming problem when it was more doable.

Early on, during the pre-diabetic phase, remission is possible, almost to the point of erasure of all of the developing diabetic anomalies.

Several pharmaceutical companies have focused on the side effects of insulin for at least 10 years. The good news is that they will be releasing new drugs to take the place of insulin, or at least reduce the use of insulin. This should not be a cause for any lessening of vigilance in the pre-diabetic, or early diabetic, because long term use may show them to be disappointing, or that the side effects will overcome the hope they bring.

Still, there is no free lunch, it all comes down to the point of intervention. Early intervention encounters only minor metabolic changes, late intervention contends with massive changes, including required use of insulin and facing the resultant weight gain..

Mcfarlane Sl. Insulin therapy and type 2 diabetes: management of weight gain. J Clin Hypertens (Greenwich). 2009 Oct;11(10):601-7. Insulin and weight gain

Diabetes complications should scare any prediabetic half to death, the list is long but for more on this see diabetes and weight gaindiabetes and weight gain, here#1