This is in fact a commonly told story about how diabetes comes about. It matches with some of the science. But it's also clearly incomplete, as there are numerous cultures around the world that live on lots and lots of carbohydrates without developing diabetes, such as much of Asia eating mostly white rice, and hunter gatherer tribes that live off honey, and others.
Incomplete is correct, asian cultures eat a lot of carbs but until recently a lot of the carbs weren't refined. Rice was eaten with the husk, and it was a luxury so people didn't consume as much of it as they do now. People also didn't have the luxury of 3 meals a day.
So the point is that its easy to over indulge with our modern conveniences and thus developing type 2 diabetes is a lot easier today.
Oversimplification. Brown rice and fructose, for example, are metabolized very differently from one another. I do agree that pinpointing a lower-level MOA other than just “insulin” will be a valuable discovery. But that MOA, whatever it is, isn’t the root of the problem. Is anyone suggesting we ought to devise a pharmaceutical treatment for broken behavioral patterns, income inequality, and mass production of processed foods?
> Is anyone suggesting we ought to devise a pharmaceutical treatment for broken behavioral patterns, income inequality, and mass production of processed foods?
Is it the most effective treatment? Then yes.
That does not preclude also trying to avoid the problem in the first place. But fixing behavioural patterns is one of the things we are worst at. Fixing diabetes won't fix all of the other issues of a bad diet, so it's not like the incentive to improve peoples diets will go out the window, though it might reduce the individual incentives for some people.
But that's true for all kinds of things - we can't withhold treatment options because some people will take the availability of treatment as a reason not to be cautious.
