Asklemmy

I have a couple.

• Celiac disease. Most people, if they’ve heard of it, believe it’s a physical intolerance to gluten/wheat similar to lactose intolerance. Or, many people think it’s semi-imaginary gluten intolerance and some insist it doesn’t even exist. In fact it is a serious autoimmune disease that affects about every system in your body, and can produce dozens of symptoms ranging from complete debilitation to mild discomfort. Hair loss, dry skin, chronic diarrhea mixed with constipation, anxiety, memory loss, brain fog, insomnia, extreme fatigue, slow growth in children, anemia, osteoporosis, and even more… plus can lead to other autoimmune diseases. Nobody knows what causes Celiac as 30x as many people have the genes as ever develop it, and it can start at any time in life.

• type 1 diabetes. Most people have heard diabetes as the 24x as common Type 2 Diabetes, and believe diabetes in general affects overweight people and has something to do with eating “too much sugar”. That’s not quite right for type 2 but it also has nothing at all to do with type 1. T1 used to be called “juvenile diabetes” because it affected people from ages 0-25. However, they changed the name because they found adults could get it, which is what happened to me (called LADA). Type 1 and Type 2 are practically opposite conditions that both affect your glucose regulation and have overlapping effects. Type 2 is where your body puts out so much insulin, it stops responding to insulin, called insulin resistance. It can be reversed to some extent by diet and exercise. Type 1 is an autoimmune condition where your body destroy the cells that produce insulin, leading to no insulin in the body at all, which can quickly be fatal. Unlike type 2, there’s no lifestyle or diet correlation, only genetics.