Diabetes rates are rising and 'forever chemicals' could be partly to blame

Forever Chemicals were once everywhere. Some were in the byproducts of paper milling, they turned up in cosmetics and in cigarette smoke, they are in firefighting foam, and they can persist in soil and water for years. Avoiding them in modern life is nearly impossible. Teflon pans, cosmetics, food packaging, but there's also compounds that we know that are in cigarette smoke, for example, car exhaust. There's flame retardants that are in our clothes or the walls of our house. They're everywhere. Forever chemicals dissolve in fat, and so they tend to build up and stay in the liver. But the Carleton biology researcher Jenny Bruin and the team in her lab had a hunch. Bruin and these researchers were already investigating type 2 diabetes and so they went looking for forever chemicals in the pancreas. Which is our organ that has those cells that secrete insulin. And so we've been showing that these chemicals are present in the pancreas, which is a concern. Not only did they find them there, but they showed that in people with higher concentrations, the pancreas made less insulin. Poyck, her colleague Angela Cheng, and Bruin's names are now on a recent paper in the journal Nature Communications that suggests our environment might be increasing our risk of developing type 2 diabetes. It's a groundbreaking study. Diabetes Canada lead researcher Rachel Reeves says genetics, diet, and economics are all known to play a part in type 2 diabetes, but this is something quite new. This study, it's first evidence of pollution being a risk factor. These researchers say about one in three Canadians has diabetes or prediabetes. Which is a huge proportion of people and rates are really like that around the world and we know that diabetes rates are increasing at an exponential rate around the world. So it's essential that we understand why this is happening. For people living with diabetes, discovering that industrial chemicals might be partly to blame is hardly comforting. The chemicals may be long banned but they haven't disappeared. And researchers say the toll they take on the human body is only now coming into view. Stu Mills, CBC News, Ottawa.