Current Perspectives for Diabetes and Allostatic Load: The Role of Nutrition

Abstract

Allostasis and allostatic load are new concepts explaining the changes in body stemming from chronic stress. These concepts are explained with the assessment of metabolic, cardiovascular, inflammatory, and neuroendocrine systems. Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (DM) is a chronic disease with the fluctuations in fasting plasma glucose, and also in other various biomarkers and poses a risk forother chronic diseases. The course and duration of the disease, genetic factors, and environmental factors, including nutrition, aggravate these complications. Allostatic load is a multi-system assessment. Individuals' compliance with the medical nutrition therapy in the short and long-term, changes in anthropometric and biochemical biomarkers that are used to measure the nutritional status. In the monitoring of patients with diabetes, it's important to assess metabolic, cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, and immune system biomarkers as well as fasting blood glucose. There exist studies in the literature, investigating the relationship of the allostatic load with socio-economic status, chronic diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, gender, and ethnicity. In these studies, chronic stress, nutritional status, stress, and allostasis are briefly described. In the present literature review, it was aimed to evaluate different aspects of the relationships among diabetes, nutrition, allostatic load, and stress.