14 DAY TRIAL // High-fat diets disrupt blood sugar levels and leads to the onset of diabetes, California University researchers were quoted by Reuters as saying.
"We have discovered ... a molecular trigger which begins the chain of events leading from hyperglycemia to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes," Jamey Marth, a professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the university and co-author of the study, said.
"This finding suggests new approaches to the prevention and treatment of diabetes," Marth, who is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which helped fund the research, said.
The researchers found that knocking out a single gene encoding the enzyme GnT-4a glycosyltransferase disrupts insulin production and showed that a high-fat diet suppresses the activity of GnT-4a and leads to type 2 diabetes due to failure of the pancreatic beta cells.
In its earliest phases, the disease causes failure of insulin-secreting beta cells in the pancreas, which leads to elevated blood glucose levels. As the disease progresses, the insulin-secreting beta cells overcompensate for the elevated blood glucose, and eventually pump out too much insulin. This leads to insulin resistance and full-blown type 2 diabetes.
Worldwide, more than 200 million people have type 2 diabetes, and close to 20 million people in the United States have been diagnosed with the disorder.