Wendie Trubow, MD, MBA, IFMCPPresident at Five Journeys, Functional Medicine & Wellness Provider, Best Selling Author, Passionate Champion for Health

Is Diabetes Inevitable for Everyone

3 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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1:08

In this brief dialogue, Speaker A references a common cultural belief that type 2 diabetes is an unavoidable part of aging, a notion that functional medicine practitioners reject. Speaker B explains that diabetes is not inevitable; it typically manifests in the late 40s to early 50s after decades of poor dietary choices and reduced physical activity that create insulin resistance. While younger individuals can develop the disease, the cumulative effect of sedentary habits and a slowing metabolism in later life makes it more common. The speaker notes that the average age of participants in their functional‑medicine program is 65, though younger patients are also treated. The conversation emphasizes that lifestyle, not age alone, drives diabetes risk.

Chapters

My grandmothers, they would talk about the same things, that essentially, diabetes is something you get when you get older. Now we're in functional medicine, so the inevitable aging and dysfunction is not a conversation that we buy into. But that is, I think, something that people believe, like, oh, you just get diabetes when you're older. That's what you happens when you get older. Is. Is it inevitable?
No, it's not inevitable. But typically, you know, people don't get type 2 diabetes until they're in their kind of late 40s, early 50s, because you need to be e wrong foods for a couple decades, typically, before your body develops the insulin resistance, which leads to diabetes. So you can kind of get away with a lot of bad habits in your 20s and 30s, because, you know, we're all active. Not as much we used to be. But when you're burning off 7,8000 calories a day, running around doing all these things, you can get away with some things, right? But as you get a little bit older and you get a little more sedentary now, your metabolism slows down, and now those bad habits start to catch up with you. So it's not inevitable for sure, but it is something that you see in, like, our average age patient for our program is 65 years old. That doesn't mean we don't have younger ones, but the average is 65.