can diet help hereditay diabetes

[Dancinhansen75]

My son is 14 and has pre-diabetes. Diabetes is extremely common in my family. My son eats a good amount of carbohydrates. Would eating better help him postpone and/or not get diabetes

[JDRF-VOL-SG]

It depends on whether the family history is for type 1 or type 2 diabetes. If type 1, which has an autoimmune disorder as its cause, then what he eats will not affect whether he becomes diabetic in any way. But if the family history is type 2, then yes, diet can help.

Type 1 happens usually with no family history of type 1 diabetes. I have read that it is thought that often a child who becomes a type 1 diabetic inherits one faulty gene from each of two healthy parents. Then, because the child carries the genes that make him susceptible to autoimmune system overaction, at some point he may catch a virus and his body over-corrects and kills off his pancreas' insulin-producing cells as well as the viral cells, mistaking the insulin-producing cells for virus. With this kind of diabetes, the cause has nothing to do with what he eats, and changing his diet won't help.

Type 2 has no autoimmune causes, but is usually a problem of insulin resistance, or sometimes the body just not quite producing enough insulin. In type 2, he may (one can't be sure) help prevent the full-fledged diabetes by doing the same things that adults with type 2 need to do: maintain ideal body weight (fat cells are insulin resistant, so if he is a bit on the chunky side, losing a few pounds may help); exercise; and eat a diet lower in carbohydrates, and those carbs should be carbs that are whole grains and never carbs with a high glycemic index.

If I were you, I would ask his doctor to do lab work to determine if their are antibodies present that indicate that his immune system is attacking his pancreas. If not, then his pre-diabetes may be more of a type 2 issue, and then I would certainly change his eating habits, slim him down if he is even slightly over his ideal weight, and get him into some sort of exercise program.