Cannabis Use Associated with Quadrupled Risk of Developing Type 2 Diabetes
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A study found a correlation between cannabis use and a quadrupled risk of developing type 2 diabetes, but commenters are skeptical about the causation and point out potential confounding variables.
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Title: Marijuana users less likely to be overweight or have obesity
Opening line: New research finds that, despite the common phenomenon of having “the munchies” after using marijuana, cannabis users tend to weigh less and are less likely to be obese.
This involved 33k participants in the US, so at least one order of magnitude smaller and in a different context.
I have funky blood sugar issues, and I can certainly see the overlap in how the cravings feel but never made the connection until now. Very interesting.
The research is pretty clear this is from ghrelin stimulating appetite and at the same time altering levels of leptin so a person feels less full.
It is not from a blood sugar crash.
While some studies link lower BMI, meta analysis shows cannabis is kind of a disaster if you are trying to lose weight.
It is hard to make generalizations though because it is so different if you smoke once a month, once a week or once a day.
Anecdotally it always seemed to me that it didn't make you that hungry straight out, but it did depress the feeling of satiation after eating so it is much easier to binge on food once you start eating something.
This study did not differentiate between edibles, which are loaded with sugar, and inhaled cannabis usage. And, since they are not a food product, edibles do not carry the same onus as food for labeling, nor similar regulatory oversight.
This seems a significant flaw in the data gathering and could change the ultimate conclusion of the study.
I wonder if it was truly a flaw or if it was a calculated omission.
Level Protabs are pretty amazing, so clean and zero sugar. It's literally just THC and a little bit of corn starch pressed into a pill. I break them in half and it gives me a focused creativity boost.
Tell me youre not a edible user without twlling me youre not an edible user
We know there's a path from obesity to diabetes. I think it would be interesting to see if there's a path from cannabis to obesity.
I believe the technical term is "the munchies"
I'm sure it depends on the dosage, but the relationship between usage and physical activity seems to be more nuanced than is generally understood.
Unless they are publicly consuming it (which I suspect is a bit rarer due to restrictions on and stigma about consumption in public), how would you count people who aren’t engaging in expected stoner behavior?
I don’t have a dog in this fight or suspected conclusion. Just seems like it might be harder than you think to truthfully assert “everyone knows most people who take pot just sit around”.
Mouse study: https://medschool.uci.edu/news/new-research-may-explain-why-...
Human study: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/can.2024.0069
Many people might have removed alcohol intake with cannabis use, to reduce overall caloric intake.
Source: was a burnout in college for 4 years
Some of those cravings exist to extend life and to help the species multiply. Some of them were artificial (drugs, alcohol, gambling, computer gaming).
GLP-1 agonists (wegovy, zepbound) are prescribed for certain addictions other than obesity. This shows that we don't understand addiction at all.
While Wegovy hasn't helped her lose significant weight or meaningfully enough reduced her reliance on food to deal with stress (yes, she vomits a lot), she has stopped smoking weed.
She claims quitting weed has nothing to do with the Wegovy, but before starting it, she wouldn't even acknowledge it was a problem.
As someone with a pretty drug-friendly friend group… I’m surprised to hear that happens ‘a lot’ because I have never heard of that, or experienced it myself.
In my experience, you eat food because it tastes good - and while being stoned might make some foods more satisfying texturally (ice cream when you have cotton mouth is rad) or lower your inhibition to try weird stuff, or to alter your perception in a way that exposes you to new avenues to appreciating familiar foods - I really can’t imagine that not transferring to being sober. Peanut butter and pickles still taste good sober, even if you develop an appreciation for them while stoned.
Are you saying a lot of people just stop experiencing hunger? Like does their stomach not growl and feel empty unless they’re high? Really having trouble thinking of what you could be describing, and squaring jt with what I know.
> Are you saying a lot of people just stop experiencing hunger? Like does their stomach not growl and feel empty unless they’re high?
I think maybe a better way is to understand what the best solutions are. Right now it seems to be replacing one craving with another. People who stop cigarette smoking often gain weight -- that's been well documented for decades now. Knowing that, is type 2 diabetes better or worse than smoking and risking lung cancer?
People who run get a lot of endorphins from the exercise. People who haven't run and start running get a lot of pain from it at first. Maybe after a few months they get endorphins.
GLP-1 agonists (wegovy, zepbound) do reduce food cravings, but they also are being studied for alcoholism. I've heard it could affect gambling addiction as well. The real question is, why would a GLP-1 agonist affect a gambling addiction at all?
When the first thing on your mind when you wake up is smoking weed and that's your primary activity throughout the day, food just becomes secondary, so the idea of eating without smoking first is just not realistic.
It wouldn't be shocking that at extreme use ghrelin stops acting without stimulation from cannabis.
The problem with discussion on these things is everything is dose dependent.
If you drink a glass of wine once a month the state of the extreme alcoholic is not going to line up with your experience from "drinking alcohol."
Anyway, it doesn't actually matter. Cheers.
This may be genetic, I had friends that didn't get them nearly as badly as I did.
(I have since quit weed and lost the weight.)
A regular topic of conversation at college (in the 70s!) was, if you were stranded on a desert island and could only have one - demon rum or the evil weed - which would you choose ?
Needs to be more Latin for academia to accept it.
In all seriousness, though, the common thread is a need for coping mechanisms and lacking healthy ones.
Maybe related to the large and fast swings in blood sugar energy drinks, or other strongly sweetened sodas produce.
"The munchies" is what comes after, sometimes, but not at all necessarily. Depending on the composition of the stuff, I don't get them at all, and have to remind myself to eat and drink. Sometimes for days after.
What I always do is to ingest some grape sugar like https://dextro-energy.com/en/products/cube-classic before using any THC, no matter which form.
Because when I'm not doing that, I tend to get at least a strong fit of hiccups, but more likely a case of cannabis induced emesis and dizziness.
That OFC sucks.
IF prophylactically countered by using some sort of grape-sugary thing right before THC use, that never ever happens to me. And some others neither.
So what I'm saying is, independently of "the munchies" which come after using anything THCish, it does something to your blood-sugar, fast.
At least for some people, with certain metabolic settings.
Used repeatedly, over longer timeframes, I wouldn't be surprised that this is causing some maladaption, leading to some form diabetes.
Again, indepent of "munchies", or not.
This should be nothing new, because I didn't discover this by myself, but got it as a tip by experienced users, almost 40 years ago.
edit: maybe some form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypoglycemia
That's 4x.
That seems quite large to me.
As I read, the endocannabinoid system in the brain is pretty homeostasic.
Does something similar happen with cannabis munchies subsiding to people who ingest THC or whole leaf products daily?
Not sure where you live, but this is what I use for CBN: https://www.charlottesweb.com/products/stay-asleep-cbn-gummi...
One gummy (10mg) works for about 2-3 nights, then I get another 2-3 nights effect with 20mg. Then I have to cease taking it for several days.
Not sure you can have a vegetables or fruits overdose or even be addicted to them, but you cannot have too much of those.
And to drown yourself by drinking water, you would need to drink around 7 liters in a day. You will start to feel really bad a few liters before that.
Generally speaking we accept those for the other benefits of vitamins / fibre intake, et cetera. This study is quite weak, and if the upside in some cases is improved mental health, and the risks of diabetes can be mitigated with exercise, then perhaps we need to view cannabis the same way.
Also someone at age 18 already being a regular stoner to age 25 being a regular stoner is vastly different.
However, a connection of particular interest concerns ADHD, a disorder identified as having a strong link to obesity, including common genetic predisposition [0]. Furthermore, individuals with ADHD are also more likely than non-ADHD peers to develop drug dependence, including cannabis-use disorder [1,2]. If ADHD was not among direct or indirect exclusion criteria, the results of the recent study could be misleading or at least incompletely characterized.
I'll refrain from suggesting this to be deliberate on the authors' part, but there's obviously some bias at play here.
I think it is widely recognized that exercise and an active lifestyle can lower the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Remembering my cannabis consumption days, being under the influence of cannabis is not exactly a state that encourages an "active lifestyle".
Curious how many people who use both cannabis AND amphetamines develop type 2 diabetes.
I suspect it's a smaller number.
Cannabis causes obesity in some, due to its impact on appetite. Do we need to draw out links to everything that we already know obesity causes and act like this is somehow interesting information?
Sugar has nothing to do with diabetes. Regards, Nestle. /s
https://www.veriheal.com/blog/study-women-who-consume-a-lot-...
there needs to be a paper that reconciles conflicting findings.
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After controlling HDL and LDL cholesterol, uncontrolled high blood pressure, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, cocaine use, alcohol use and several other lifestyle risk factors, the researchers found that new cases of diabetes were significantly higher in the cannabis group (1,937; 2.2%) compared to the healthy group (518; 0.6%), with statistical analysis showing cannabis users at nearly four times the risk of developing diabetes compared to non-users.
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Note "nearly four times the risk of developing diabetes" -- this feels like a dangerous exaggeration of "four times the correlation of having developed diabetes." No controls for diet, exercise, etc. In comparison to a gold standard clinical trial this is about as far as you can go on the other end.
That's not to say that I think that a prospective link doesn't merit deeper research -- far from it. In fact, Novo Nordisk has an anti-obesity drug in phase 2a trials, monlunabant [1], that serves as a CB1 (cannabinoid receptor 1) inverse agonist which has a mechanism of action inverse to THC. The clinical trials are showing that it creates modest weight loss, so it seems that there's likely something to how that receptor is activated that could cause weight gain. What's not clear to me is whether all the other receptors that THC activates create a compound effect at a population health level that leads to net weight gain and the development of diabetes, the inverse, or non-correlated outcomes, and whether those occur across the board or differentially based on genetic makeup.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monlunabant
It makes sense for the same reason that prediabetic people feel better with cannabis
There are a number of impulse control disorders that I feel are all related, in the sense that if you’ve got a lack of impulse control you’re more likely to overeat, consume drugs and alcohol, get addicted to video games, gamble, have risky sex, etc. I have gone down a few of these paths personally due to to my own problems with impulse control and have seen similar patterns in others.