Until a few decades ago, certain 'new-world' populations that kept to traditional dietary habits were virtually free from diabetes; then, after they began eating some foods that are common in Europe, the disease reached epidemic proportions. Europeans, by contrast, have a low rate of diabetes. To account for this paradox, it has been suggested that those new-world populations have a thrifty genotype, which would have conferred a selective advantage during the frequent famines of the past, while today it would be detrimental because the recently adopted foods are constantly available. Here it is proposed that thrifty genes are unlikely to exist. Both the diabetes epidemics that occur in newly westernized populations and the low rate of diabetes in Europeans can be explained by the hypothesis that Europeans, through millenary natural selection, have become adapted, albeit incompletely, to some diabetogenic foods for which humankind is genetically unequipped.
Endocrinologists were not included in the multidisciplinary working groups that prepared two recent reports on chronic fatigue syndrome, despite its unequalled clinical overlap with Addison's disease, which is a classic endocrine disorder. The failure to include at least one endocrinologist in those panels may explain why in their extensive reports there is not a single word about the 42 clinical features that chronic fatigue syndrome shares with Addison's disease, including all the signs and symptoms listed in the case definition of this syndrome.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.