It’s time to control your “junk food pangs” and stay away from your all favorite fries, burgers and biscuits if you want to pamper your kidneys. You know that diabetes harms the kidneys, but now a study claims that eating junk food can also damage the kidneys in an identical manner.
Obesity has a direct link with type 2 diabetes. There is plenty of research evidence that states that people who are overweight need to be very careful, as obesity is one of the major reasons for causing type 2 diabetes. The insulin production in type 2 diabetes is in insufficient quantities or the body is impervious to the insulin in the body and thus sugar levels increase in blood.
The glucose levels in the body start to rise and it strains the working of the organs. Diabetes can cause diabetic kidney disease and all this is because the sugar levels rise and collect in the blood and damage the kidneys, state researchers.
Talking about this the researchers feel that, “finding a way to block glucose reabsorption in the kidneys could offer a potential treatment for lowering blood sugar levels”.
The researchers of the UK study tested animal models of diabetes and diet-induced obesity models to see how resistance to hormone insulin resistance and excess sugar or fat consumption affect “glucose transporters in the kidneys”.
The scientists from Anglia Ruskin University fed their rats sample with cheese, biscuits, chocolate, and marshmallow laden junk foods for about 6 weeks. The researchers also tried a high fat 60% content chow for the rats in the experiment.
After this the blood sugar levels of the rats were examined to study their response to the diets administered to them. The tests were also used to assess glucose transporters present in the kidneys. The diet influence on the transporters was assessed by evaluating the outcome on both type of rats – the Type 1 models and Type 2 models.
Havovi Chichger from Anglia Ruskin University has stated “In our study, type 1 and type 2 diabetes both induce changes in glucose transport in the kidney, but junk food or a diet high in fat causes changes that are very similar to those found in type 2 diabetes. Understanding how diet can affect sugar handling in the kidneys and whether the inhibitors can reverse these changes could help to protect the kidneys from further damage.”
The details of the study findings are published in the Experimental Physiology.
