Fatty Liver And Diabetes
January 3, 2009 by rainier
Diabetes mellitus, or type 2 diabetes, usually develops in men or women over 40 years of age although it is now being seen in overweight children.It is a condition that occurs when your body cannot regulate the amount of glucose in your blood. Glucose is a sugar produced when you digest your food. It is also produced and stored by your liver.
Blood glucose levels are regulated by insulin, a hormone produced by your pancreas. Problems start when your body either does not produce enough insulin (as in type I diabetes) or if the muscle, liver and fat cells do not respond normally to insulin. This latter situation is called insulin resistance and leads to a high level of glucose in the blood (hyperglycemia), which is harmful. Insulin also helps your liver to metabolise (process) fats and to release them into the blood. While fats are a necessary source of energy, too much fat in the blood is bad for you. It is now thought that insulin resistance interferes with this process and causes an accumulation of triglyceride fats in the liver cells.
Having too much triglyceride and another lipid that may be better known, cholesterol, in the bloodstream is known as hyperlipidaemia. Cholesterol is also taken in from our diet and produced by the liver. High levels of a so-called ‘bad’ cholesterol known as LDL cholesterol (low density lipoprotein cholesterol) can lead to heart disease. Counter to this, there is a ‘good’ cholesterol (HDL, high density lipoprotein cholesterol) that removes the LDL cholesterol and gets rid of it through the liver. Thus, having a ratio of high LDL to low HDL in the blood is not desirable.
