Archive for December 8th, 2009

Weight, Diabetes Huge Healthcare Burden

Reading about the projections for people who will probably have or be diagnosed with diabetes in the next several years – after 2030, specifically, really hammered home the point to me that we are dealing with a huge epidemic in not only this country, but worldwide, that hinges on people’s weight and their food choices.

Or perhaps you can look at it as a food supply problem, one which is only exacerbated by the fact that we have so many processed, highly salted and fatted and sugared food readily available to us on an increasing basis.  Sure, we always will have to exercise our willpower and choices for what we eat to be able to truly harness the power of what food can do for us, in a good way, but it definitely doesn’t help when you have bad foods shoved in your face every day which are both cheap and easily accessible.

It especially doesn’t help when the country is in a time of full on economic roughness, where processed, cheaply attained foods tend to be the cheapest foods that you can find. Obesity got dealt a winning hand when that happened.  Obesity is not just a disease of the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, but it is a problem without caste or class ranking that hits all types of people.  And so what comes with obesity often times?

Many times people are are considered obese also are diagnosed with diabetes. Diabetes is often basically looked at as kind of a symptom of the obesity epidemic. Often times obese people make food choices that really whack their blood sugar out of balance, and this leads to insulin resistence, which leads to diabetes.  Diabetes increases the odds of all kinds of catastrophic health risks such as heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, cancer and the list goes on and on.

It’s no wonder the healthcare system i already greatly strained as it is. I hope that with this health care “reform”, we really start to see more aim taken at the causes of health problems and not so much on the back end treatment spectrum of the problem. If we can address these issues upfront, then we can dramatically cut the amount that the taxpayers end up paying in the end for treating these types of health problems, and we can also cut private health insurance premiums pretty dramatically as well, resulting in an overall benefit to everyone.