Sun exposure link to type 2 diabetes

Regular exercise in the Australian sunshine could provide a double benefit for
warding off type 2 diabetes.
Not only was this positive for overall health and keeping trim, Dr Jenny Gunton said
the dose of vitamin D it provided could also help to prevent the disease.
"There's a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest that vitamin D might play a
role in type 2 diabetes," Dr Gunton, from Sydney's Garvan Institute, told AAP on
Monday.
"If you have low levels you are more likely to develop diabetes in the future, and
people with diabetes are more likely to have low levels.
"But that doesn't tell us whether it causes diabetes ... You could equally argue
that people with diabetes do less exercise and so that's why they have less vitamin
D."
The link could also help to explain the heightened rates of type 2 diabetes seen
among night-shift workers.
Dr Gunton said she is aiming to answer the question "once and for all" with a
two-year project, involving mice genetically modified to give them impaired vitamin
D processing.
After initial monitoring of their blood glucose levels, the mice will be fed a diet
high in fat and sugar to see whether they were particularly prone to developing the
condition.
Dr Gunton said while it was an unhealthy diet for a mouse it was designed to mirror
what was a very common diet for humans.
"It's rather like the diet consumed by about a third of Americans, so not an extreme
diet," she said.
Dr Gunton was announced this week as a recipient of a major $150,000 Millennium
Award grant, from the Diabetes Australia Research Trust (DART), to undertake the
research.
Her work was one 28 diabetes-related studies that will share in a total $2.1 million
in DART grants for 2011.
Every day 275 Australians newly develop diabetes - a disease which involves
life-threatening and altering complications such as heart attack, stroke, kidney
damage, blindness and lower leg amputation.
Dr Gunton said a person's genes could place them at a heightened risk while the
"21st century is a really fantastic environmental trigger" for diabetes with its
"calories, and escalators, and lifts and labour saving devices".
"Get outdoors and do a little bit more exercise and if you can't do half an hour a
day then five or ten minutes is better than nothing," she said.
"Five or ten minutes is also enough to help your vitamin D as long as it was at a
sensible time of day ... that's important because we don't want people getting
sunburned."



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