The Real Truth Behind Diabetes Awareness
Tapping into the true details of Diabetes Care
Friends, Welcome back to ZigZagNutrition - my place to explore all things health, wellness, healing, and meaning in the world we live.
My goal with this newsletter is - and has always been - to serve you, to support you with insight, information, and inspiration to improve your health and improve your life for the better. If you can do me any favor, would you please like, comment, and find something meaningful that stuck out for you and share with others? 🌟
Thank you for being here, now let’s dive in! 👇👇👇
When I was in college, I got real up close and personal with the topic of diabetes.
Why? Because Diabetes is a disease that affects just so many people around the world.. and because the research department was willing to pay me to look into diabetes trends around the world. I was tasked with exploring global costs of diabetes for certain countries and regions around the world.
I knew Diabetes was affecting a lot of people here at home in the United States, but I was less familiar with global trends. It turns out, diabetes was rapidly growing around the world.
Take a look at these three illustrations for yourself. What do you notice?
Represented another way…
🧠 I don’t know if our little brains can really wrap our minds around just how expensive diabetes really is.
The true cost of diabetes is hard to measure, because diabetes is a broad label we use to describe a complex and widespread disease process that inevitably impacts several major systems of the body, from the eyes to the toes, from the brain to the kidneys, to the heart, and fingertips.
Diabetes can lead people to need dialysis - a treatment for people whose kidneys are failing. When you have kidney failure, your kidneys don’t filter blood the way they should normally. As a result, wastes and toxins build up in the bloodstream.
Since your kidneys are not filtering your blood, dialysis has to do it for you. It’s a highly expensive and time intensive treatment that takes a mental, emotional, and physical toll on patients, but it saves their lives from the lack of proper kidney function.
👀 Diabetes can lead people to lose their vision, nerve function in their toes and fingertips, restrict blood flow, and prevent healing in peripheral tissues, which can lead to amputation and dozens of skin issues from diabetic blisters to foot ulcers, infections, and other issues.
Diabetes is a major cause of blindness, kidney failure, heart attacks, stroke and lower limb amputation.
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So, when we think about costs, there is a lot to think about - from hospitalizations to services utilized, to costs from loss work, caretaker burden, and much more. According to the Journal of Health Economics and Outcome Research, global health expenditure for diabetes care was $232 Billion in 2007 and most recently estimated to be $966 Billion in 2021. To put those numbers in a different perspective, that means that the world spent $232,000,000,000 in 2007 and almost $1 Trillion dollars on diabetes care in 2021 at $966,000,000,000.
Other research teams have estimated that global cost burdens reside around $1.3 trillion in 2015 and suggest costs will rise to $2.1 trillion by 2030. 💰
Wonder why the costs of diabetes are skyrocketing in the U.S.? Well, for one thing, the price for insulin has shot off to the moon in recent years. Take a look at this, which doesn’t even have data from the last 5 yrs of increase.
A new study by Dickson and colleagues reports that, from 2012 to 2019, gross sales for 4 leading insulin products in the US more than doubled (from $13 billion to $27 billion), while net sales after rebates and other confidential discounts dropped by approximately 40% (from $8 billion to $5 billion).
If the the term “price gouging” comes to mind, you wouldn’t be alone. 😬
In all, diabetes affects more than 1 in 10 adults today, with some estimates suggesting that number will grow to be about 1 in 8 adults over the next 20 years. If we look back just a few decades in 1980, there were only around 108 million people with diabetes, compared to 4x that amount in 2014 at 422 million people globally. Clearly, something changed in our human experience that led to such a surge of prevalent diabetes around the world.
Can you take any guesses?
I’m sure you can.
Go ahead, let me know in the comments below!
🧬🧬 Contrary to what most mainstream media publications will tell you, diabetes is not a genetic disease that automatically “runs in families.” Diabetes is not caused by an aging population or by growth in urbanism or socio demographic or socioeconomic disadvantages. Those messages are bloody lies and have been hurting people for many years.
All of the above mentioned talking points are related to diabetes, sure, but they fail to address the root cause of metabolic disorders like diabetes. These are all downstream effects and can be included as pieces of the greater puzzle, but we can’t get stuck thinking that there is nothing we can do to help our patients or ourselves when it comes to diabetes care.
You see, the primary culprit behind the growth of diabetes around the world is our gross dependence on ultra-processed foods and increasingly sedentary lifestyles.
There are a number of other factors too, such as theories around EMF exposure inhibiting glucose uptake into the cell, micronutrient status, elevated cortisol and insulin levels with increasing stressful times in our culture, the lack of proper sleep hygiene, and more.
Clinically, I’ve seen brutal disease states of diabetes grow from blue-collar males who work too much, drink too much alcohol, and sleep too little. They will work for 30 years, drink 1-5 beers a night and more on weekends, and go through decades without any ounce of self-care. This pattern destroys the pancreatic beta cells that help produce insulin as well as wrecks our body’s ability to remain insulin sensitive.
You’ve seen it before. The big beer bellies on some of these guys you see too commonly in America. This body type is absolutely rare to see elsewhere around the globe. For those of you who travel internationally, you know what I’m talking about. Surprisingly, mindfulness can play a massive difference in someone’s health journey for treating diabetes. 🧠
I’ve also seen diabetes manifest itself in a family who all practice the same ultra-processed dietary pattern 🍪 🍕 and have been led to believe that diabetes runs in their family genes and there is nothing they can do about it. 🍟 🍔 Clearly, this is a destructive lie spoken either out of ignorance or deceit - or both.
What we see when we look internationally at diabetes trends is that diabetes seems to rise faster in 1st world countries, particularly for those countries who have most adopted the ultra-processed food patterns of the infamous Standard American Diet (aka SAD). We also observed similar effects when the United States essentially partitioned the Native American population into internment camps and fed them commodity leftovers. They quickly developed contemporary diseases of alcoholism, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease at rates unseen in their historical heritage.
Similarly, we see that trend paralleled in Central and South America as well in places like Mexico, where at one time Coca-Cola was cheaper than water and children were drinking soda multiple times a day, every day. 🥤🥤
Several studies have linked a Westernized diet with type two diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, high cholesterol, dementia, and ADHD. This is just one of the many ways in which Western philosophical globalization has done the rest of the world a grave disservice. 👎👎
When I wrote about How America Ruined Food for the Rest of the World, I never anticipated how popular the article would become. I never expected I would have thousands of people looking at the story online. Clearly, the story hit a very important heart string for people across cultures and diverse backgrounds.
If you’ve been following this newsletter for any time, you likely know that I’m a fan of Slow Food, where we believe in food that is good, clean, and fair - for all. 🇮🇹 Compared to western philosophies for ultra-processed foods, Italy, the home of the Slow Food Movement, has been adamant and proactively diligent to ensure they remain food sovereign.
There are many aspects of Western culture that seem to degrade the purest forms of historical human experience, but obviously there are marvelous things about the West that we have to be proud about.
In not every country could I even publish this newsletter publicly or have access to such privileged societal safety nets as I do. I am simultaneously proud of what we stand for while fully acknowledging with indignant force that we have really screwed up in major ways and have some work to do to heal our broken systems.
So as we think about the true cause of Diabetes in America let’s say, we must talk about food. There are piles of research that point us to see that increased intake of ultra-processed foods is associated with higher risks of developing Type 2 Diabetes. One study even found that with every 10% incremental increase in ultra-processed food consumption, there was a 25% higher risk of developing Type 2 Diabetes.
Type 2 diabetes affects how your body uses sugar (glucose) for energy. It stops the body from using insulin properly, which can lead to high levels of blood sugar if not treated. As you can imagine, food and drink plays a primary driver for this disease state.
But miraculously, we now fully understand how we can catch this condition early and prevent it completely. Even moreso, we have amazing tools like continuous glucose monitors (aka CGMs) and tactics like these natural solutions to help support people with diabetes to better understand how their body responds to various foods and drinks to better strategize how to optimize their diet to promote healing and put their diabetes in remission. 👏👏
This is something I’ve helped people do more than once. It’s just awesome to see what transformative healing can happen in someone’s psyche when they realize they possess the power in their hands to take control of their health for the better. Rather than seeing diagnosis as a death sentence, we see it as a descriptive label to help us understand a disease process. With that knowledge of diagnosis, we can then capitalize on diet and lifestyle strategies to stop that disease process in its tracks and get the body back on the road to healing. ☀️
But of course, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Catching things early is always the best method for maintaining good health and having the best chance at optimal function.
So why don’t we focus more on the kids? We should. We should focus on the children, on the schools, and on the families in our communities.
One of the most shocking stats I have to share with you today is that according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one in three American children born after 2000 will develop type 2 diabetes in his or her lifetime.
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Clearly, we are suffering - unnecessarily. Clearly, we need to change. Clearly, we need some help. Clearly, we have some work to do. Hopefully, just as clear to you is the fact that we can in fact do something to get behind this early in life before the disease of diabetes actually manifests. We can prevent it. We can push diabetes into remission with diet and lifestyle. I’ve seen it. I’ve helped people do it.
There is hope. There is always more to the story than what we’ve been told.
Interested in my personalized supplement stack to support lifestyle medicine based interventions? Take a look over at my virtual dispensary with Designs for Health. When it comes to blood sugar balance, I like GlucoSupreme™ Herbal and Metabolic Synergy™ as part of this Type 2 Diabetes Support Protocol.
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I won’t mention the name of the drug because I know diabetes is a side affect of quiet a few drugs and in general I would never want to discourage people from taking prescribed medications, but do be aware and read the phamplets that come with your medication.
So I was on various medications as had been diagnosed bi-polar. One of them does say as a potential side affect can give you diabetes. They did the blood tests every year and I think year 2 I was normal results for blood glucose about 43 and then zoomed up the next year to 58 which is really high to the point they wanted me on medication straight away. I absolutely refused and came off the medication against doctors orders. Made sure my diet was spot on and went back to being pre-diabetic with-in a year. Since then I know I was incorrectly diagnosed as actually have PMDD so should never have been on medication in first place.