Health/medical opinions, NOT advice - two topics

I don't know a great deal about cholesterol but I do know that saturated fats will raise cholesterol, so reducing the amount of sat fats in your diet may be a good idea, replacing them with mono and poly unsaturated fats is a good way to lower cholesterol.

Type 2 diabetes is when the body has effectively become resistant to insulin, you still produce it but your body does not respond. It is thought that everyone will become type 2 diabetic if they lived long enough. Having a high sugar diet and obesity are risk factors for type 2, so reducing your risk of getting it would be best achieved by having a lower sugar intake, so fizzy drinks, chocolate and sweets etc etc in excess will be doing you no favours.

Keep fit and healthy, don't eat much of foods high in saturated fats, and watch your sugar intake. Not sure where you live but in the UK we have a GDA (guideline daily amount) system that shows how much all food products contains of calories, fat, sat fat, salt, sugar etc so it is quite easy to see whether what you're eating is good for you (if you can't tell using common sense)

Hope this helped

 

It just simply does. It's when the body massively overreacts to nothing. In a similar way that a cold can cause major sepsis, it's not the bacteria, it's the body massively overreacting. Arthritis is when the body starts attacking the tendons in your body, an overreaction of the immune system.

There are plenty of examples, it's basically just the immune system being dumb and thinking that a particular harmless thing is somehow extremely harmful. Our bodies aren't perfect. We don't need our little toes, we no longer have a use for our appendix, our carotid arteries and jugular veins are way too close to the surface and easy to cut. Evolution did it's best, unfortunately it also fucked a lot up.

 

"And are these claims that these heavier famous people with unhealthy diets have slimmed down and changed their diets to become Type 2 diabetes free realistic?"

In a word no. They have not become 'Type 2 diabetes free' in fact they will carry the increased risk they have given themselves before changing their diet with them in to old age. In a medical sense, they have simply identified lifestyle risk factors (i.e. poor diet) and changed it to reduce the risk factor.

To make this a little clearer, it would be like saying a smoker quitting is making themselves lung cancer free. Now I hope you can see that that is obviously not the case, they are just preventing their smoking having any further risk to their health (i.e. getting lung cancer) but they are still likely to develop it because they smoked for many years.

Obviously this is a good thing to do as it is the next best thing to having never smoked, much like improving your diet in adult life to reduce your risk of type 2 diabetes. You can never be 'free' of a disease like cancer or diabetes, everyone has a chance of getting these diseases but others have higher predispositions to them due to lifestyle and past medical history etc etc etc