Rodney

This is bad.... really bad...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/09/ny...9diabetes.html

This is only the first part of a very long article. Follow the link to read the rest, or tell me if you want me to post the entire thing.

Ten percent? That's staggering. You wonder how it could get this bad... and then wander through an inner city grocery store, and 2/3 of everything you see is packaged snack or processed processed food. And people live on that because they don't or can't cook, or don't know better.

JustJess

All those processed foods... all that high-fructose corn syrup. That will, if you'll pardon my language, fuck you up and good.

My grandmother died of diabetes... it's not a pretty disease. If you have it, please take care of yourself - just because you're taking insulin doesn't mean you can eat any way you please. If you don't have it... be grateful and keep the weight off if you can to avoid triggering it.

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Cynthetiq

It's amazing but true.

I don't eat all that crap even though I like it. I know that I feel better when I make it at home with my own TLC processed into it.

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Willravel

Interesting comparison between AIDS and diabetes...as some times they are both preventable! I hope that New York can learn a lesson from this and start importing more fresh foods (fruits, veggies, lean meat, whole grain products) and maybe kick out sokme of those pesky fast food places. McDonalds is the devil. How sad for those poor people.

maleficent

it's not just poor people - -I lived in upper manhattan for a bunch of years - not in an slum -- but it definitely wasn't the Yupper west side.. it was working people - living in a reasonable area... in my immediate area... there were no grocery stores... the only thing around were the corner bodegas - In the summer months the bodegas might have fresh vegetables - in the winter - forget it -- fresh meats were not possible to get-- if you wanted meats - it'd be the processed variety... if you didn't have a car - getting to a grocery store was next to impossible...

When i lived downtown - it wasn't much better- but at least then I could take the path train over to nj -and use m y little old lady shopping cart

NYC doesn't have a plethora of real grocery stores that are in accessible areas.

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Cynthetiq

There's plenty of green markets in NYC. You just have to get off your duff and go get them. There's also chinatown which has plenty of veggies.

Green Markets

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Willravel

I didn't mean poor as in financial status, I meant poor as in humble and worth my pity and sorrow.

maleficent

i know they exist -- but when I lived uptown -- that was 187th street... it's a long hike downtown... it's not like it was just around the corner...

it's not like you can run out the front door get some veggies and be home in 5 minutes...

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JustJess

Junk food is always more convenient. It's just closer, faster, everything. Easy for the average person to not feel like going out to find something better that would take longer to cook anyway!

__________________
My heart knows me better than I know myself, so I'm gonna let it do all the talkin'.

Tachion

You should see the movie 'Super Size me".

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390521/

It is an excellent way to understand just how the fast food diet can quickly turn your health around.

In two weeks from eating MCDonalds everyday he started showing signs of liver damage!

Must see movie.

Willravel

Like an apple? I see this is a bit of an excuse to eat something that has been proven to be chemically addictive.

JustJess

An apple? In NYC? That's worse than McDonald's!!

Ahem, sorry, snarkiness came out again.

No, I'm just saying that when the bodegas downstairs have all that processed and premade stuff available, and the real grocery store or the market is several blocks, maybe several 10s of blocks away, people are lazy. Plus, in NYC, that fresh stuff costs twice as much money for half as much food usually. So it's hard to motivate yourself to get real food for that much more money.

__________________
My heart knows me better than I know myself, so I'm gonna let it do all the talkin'.

Suave

I wouldn't say "worse". Yes, it's bad, but type 2 diabetes (or type 1 adult, whichever it is) can be defeated with diet change. You get AIDS, you are basically dead very soon.

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Rodney

As a disease in one person, AIDS is worse. As an epidemic in the population, diabetes is worse; much more out of control than AIDS.

According to the (full) article, diabetes cannot be defeated with diet change. Delayed, yes; maybe for decades. But not defeated. Live long enough, and it gets you. And if you develop your type 2 at a young age, as more and more are doing, you definitely will live long enough.

The full article also went on to say that the majority of people with Type 2 do a poor job of managing their disease; it's apparently a lot easier said than done.

Suave

One could say the same about obesity. And I'd say we should be thankful that we are being plagued by diseases of the wealthy (diabetes, heart disease, etc) instead of ebola and AIDS like other places.

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"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions." - Albert Einstein

"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something." - Plato

Ustwo

(Both of these pictures are from the article)

Call me uncaring, but I don't care. If you want to eat yourself to death, be my guest, just don't expect me to pay taxes for your treatment.

I hope they find a cure for type I diabetes, as its a true disease that effects children through no fault of their own.

Type II for most part is the result of poor life choices, its no different than the diseases brought on by smoking, and its their own damn fault.

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snowy

Surprisingly, I'm with Ustwo here. I have a hard time caring about people with a disease they basically brought on themselves through excessive consumption, lack of exercise, and so on. It's really not too different from lung cancer or emphysema caused by smoking, or cirrhosis caused by drinking. These people knew the consequences of their actions.

So I suggest we take the same action we've taken with educating people about those diseases: let them know diabetes is a direct consequence of the choices they make not to take care of themselves. I think people see Type II diabetes as some kind of harmless, manageable disease, when obviously that is far from the truth.

Public education, not public-supported treatment, is the answer here.

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Rodney

Ah, but you will. If it's as bad as it sounds, right or wrong, there's no way around it. If someday 25 or 30 percent of the families in America have diabetes sufferers in them, the politicians will fall all over themselves to pander to the voters. Because this problem is definitely not limited to NYC, and not to Democrats or Republicans.

I originally posted the article because I found it shocking that the problem was so bad in New York. But not because the problem was strange to me. I spent some time in the wonderful world of education recently, working in schools in some pretty poor districts. In those schools it's more common to see a chubby kid than a "normal" one, more common to see a fat kid than a lean one, and more common to see an obese kid than an athletic one.

The parents usually have little or no education; both parents are working, or it's a single-parent unit that's sharing housing with relatives. All the adults are working, it's hazardous or dangerous to play outside (either there are no parks nearby, or gangs), and so the kids stay home after school as latchkeys or under the supervision of an older kid. They sit there and play video games, and eat snack food. The snack food is there because the adults aren't cooking. The kids even eat junk food for breakfast. The parents really don't know about it -- they have very little education, know little about health and nutrition, have little time to cook, and hell, the kids like it. The parents are pretty hefty, too, but because they're usually busy humping boxes, cleaning offices, or working in the fields for a living, the problem's not as bad.

The kids don't eat their healthy school lunches because they're too full on the snack food -- did I mention they bring it to school and eat it at recess? I talked a couple of parents about this, and it comes down to this: 1) it's cheap, 2) the kids like it and ask for it, and 3) they want to kids to have things they like, if they can afford to give it to them. And snack food is cheap.

(I worked at a school for homeless kids for a while, and _those_ kids were in better shape than the low-income kids with housing, because we made sure that they got two balanced meals a day, five days a week, plus apple slices only for snacks. And soup kitchens tend to serve nutritionally balanced meals, at least out here. And you don't tend to sit in the living room all day when you don't have a living room to sit in; of course, who says a vacant lot full of broken glass and used needles is any better?)

There is a problem in places like NYC, apparently, where low-income people don't have transport or convenient access to healthy foods. In the SF Bay Area, which I live near, some community and senior citizens in inner cities are beginning to address that by holding "farmer's markets:" essentially, the staff goes to a wholesaler every week, buys a bunch of greens, brings it back to the neighborhoods and sells it at cost. More like this needs to be done; if you make it easy to get bad food and harder to get good food, what's going to happen?

So one answer is better access to good food, in some urban areas. But the main point is education. Ust, maybe you just don't understand how many people in this country don't have a clue. The schools I worked with were trying to do what they could; but when one principal tried to ban bringing snack food to schools, the parents rose up in wrath, because she was being "mean" to their kids. They haven't a clue. They need to get one. A national campaign might help, targeted at the people who know the least and are the most outside the mainstream. You can't just say, help the kids and not the adults; because the adults who don't know are raising the kids to be diabetic.

Would you pay for education? I hope, yes, because otherwise you're helping to foot the tab for this trainwreck, whether you like it or not. Gawd bless democracy.

Cynthetiq

No smoking was public education for many years. Taxation was to be a deterrent but met with limited success.

I'm all for taxing of snack foods and extreme calories like Hungry Man XXL in excess of 1,000 calories.

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Charlatan

Given that smoking is in decline, I'd say the public education and taxation of cigarettes seems to have made some difference.

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xepherys

This sounds like media overhype to me. I understand that diabetes is a bad thing to have. My mother-in-law has it, but she does just fine with it. It seems like anytime something happens to someone with diabetes, it's always a secondary issue, meaning the diabetes was primary and "the cause" for everything else. I also wonder how sound the statistics are. I hate to be in the tin foil crowd, but stats really don't bother or scare me much anymore... 76% of all statistics are bullshit anyhow. *sigh*

Cynthetiq

but there is plenty of public supported programs to stop smoking now. Smoking cessation is big business in most major metropolitains, some of it paid for by big tobacco some of it paid for by tax dollars.

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guthmund

So...they did it to themselves and we shouldn't have to pay for it?

I'm just curious....where exactly do we draw that line? Just over by the smokers and the overweight?

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