Currently browsing posts about: Diabetes

I just got off a subway car adorned with posters advertising the New York City Health Department’s “Are you pouring on the pounds?” campaign.  They are riveting.

They make a simple point, but one that is not always understood:  Soft drinks contain sugar, and lots of it.

Lots of sugar—all those packets—will make you fat.

The campaign also includes a tough video.

New York City’s Health Department is taking on the city’s high rates of heart disease and type 2 diabetes in every way it can.

Take a look.  What do you think?  Will this work?

If only meat were just a food and not the flash point for concerns about health, climate change, and tax policy.  But it looms large in all such debates.

According to reports, meat is linked not only with a higher rate of cancer but also with type 2 diabetes.   Does this make logical sense?  It could, especially if meat eaters take in more calories and are fatter than non-meat eaters.

We’ve heard so much lately about how farm animals contribute to environmental problems and climate change, but Nicolette Hahn Niman writes in the New York Times of “the carnivore’s dilemma.”  It’s not the animals themselves that contribute to climate change, it’s the industrial methods of raising them that are the problem.  She ought to know.  She and Bill Niman run the free-range ranch in Bolinas, California highlighted in Time magazine last August.

On the other hand, Princeton professor and ethicist Peter Singer argues in the New York Daily News that meat is so bad for health and the environment that it ought to be taxed.

How to deal with all of this?  Push for more humanely and sustainably raised farm animal production, dont’ eat meat if you choose not to, and if you do eat meat, just don’t eat too much of it.

Update, November 4: I forgot to include Jonathan Safran Foer’s piece in the New York Times magazine on why he is against meat.

I am always indebted to Joel Moskowitz of the University of California School of Public Health’s Center for Family and Community Health for his almost daily forwarding of research on obesity.  His recent postings include data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).  The CDC has just released preliminary results of the 2008 National Health Interview Survey.  These include, among other measures, data charts and tables on obesity (rates still rising steadily since 1997), physical activity (no measurable change), and diabetes (rising in parallel with obesity).

Interpretation: if physical activity rates have not changed, then the reason obesity rates are going up is because people are eating more calories.

Plenty of evidence backs up this idea.  All you need to do to see why people are eating more is to take a look at Time magazine’s discussion of the implications of calorie labeling: “Would you like 1,000 calories with that?”

The CDC announces that rates of type 2 diabetes have nearly doubled overall in the last ten years,and more than doubled in states in the south and in Puerto Rico.  Ten years ago, the average was around 5%; now it’s around 10%.  No surprise: the rates closely track rates of obesity.

It never would have occurred to me that cinnamon had anything to do with type 2 diabetes one way or the other–calories are what matter–but earlier studies suggested that a gram or so a day helped control blood sugar levels. Apparently, enough of such studies were available to take a look at them as a group and do a “meta-analysis.” Alas, this analysis “found no significant benefits of cinnamon supplement on glycated hemoglobin (A1C), fasting blood glucose (FBG), or other lipid parameters,” a conclusion perhaps disappointing, but not surprising.  Watch the calories! 

City University and the Public Health Association of New York City have just released their long-awaited report, “Reversing the Diabetes and Obesity Epidemics in New York City: A Call to Action.”  The report focuses on public health–rather than individual–causes of these problems and makes recommendations about how to change the environment to make it more conducive to eating better (less, I call it) and moving more.   It’s a good place to go for data on the extent of these problems.  Enjoy (?)

Today’s New York Times has a front page story by Gina Kolata, who seems to make a career of taking contrary positions on commonly held ideas about health matters. This time, she takes on common understanding of type 2 diabetes. Her article appears to argue that people with type 2 diabetes do not need to worry nearly as much about high blood sugar as they do about high blood cholesterol, that they need a mountain of drugs to stay healthy, that obesity isn’t really related to this condition (genetics counts more), and that rates of type 2 diabetes are not increasing, anyway (it’s just being diagnosed more frequently). Statisticians are unlikely ever to agree on the numbers but type 2 diabetes is the best reason I can think of to follow my “eat less, move more” mantra. Type 2 diabetes is a largely preventable condition. Yes, only small percentage of overweight individuals will develop type 2 diabetes, but the probability of getting it increases with increasing body weight. And if you look at the body weights of people who have been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, most of them–95% in some studies–are overweight. It doesn’t take much of eating less and moving more to prevent or resolve symptoms. And that works for high blood cholesterol, as well.  Doesn’t doing that seem better than being tied to a lifetime of pharmaceuticals? And what about type 2 diabetes in young children? Isn’t type 2 diabetes something that everyone ought to be trying to prevent? I wrote about these issues in an editorial in the American Journal of Public Health a couple of years ago. Read the references to it and see how they compare to the this-won’t-work attitude expressed in Gina Kolata’s article. Will her article help clear up public confusion about how to approach chronic diseases related to diet and activity levels? Do weigh in on this one.