Is Globesity Causing an Alarming Rise in Diabetes?

In 2000, over 150 million adults had diabetes worldwide. Experts predicted 200 million cases of diabetes by 2010 and as many as 300 million diabetics worldwide only ten years later. Much of the world’s attention is focused on those threatened with malnutrition or outright starvation and rightfully so but instances of diabetes are rapidly increasing in every country and on every continent in the world.

By 2010, over half of the world’s diabetic population will be Asian due to the explosion of type 2 diabetes and China and India. Asians are hardly alone. Diabetes is expected to increase by over 40% in Latin America, by 50% in Africa, by nearly 25% in Europe, and by over 30% in Australia. As you can see, no one is immune from the onslaught of diabetes.

The worldwide explosion in diabetes is being caused by a phenomenon called “globesity” by the medical community. Globesity as the term suggests refers to the number of people across the world that are obese. The International Obesity Task Force estimates that 300 million people are obese and another 750 million are overweight.

Over 30 million people die each year from obesity related causes such as heart disease, stroke, and certain types of cancer in addition to diabetes. That amounts to a staggering 60% of disease-related deaths worldwide. Obesity has doubled in Japan since 1982, doubled in the UK and the U.S. in the past two decades, and increased by roughly 40% in most European countries in the last ten years.

Contrary to popular believe, obesity is not a problem that only affects industrialized nations. In countries such as Egypt, Chile, Peru, Mexico, and Tonga nearly a quarter of the children are overweight or obese. Even in Africa where nearly 1% of the children suffer from insufficient nutrition, 3% are either overweight or obese. And the fact is that type 2 diabetes follows obesity so where obesity exists today a proportionate number of type 2 diabetes cases will exist to tomorrow.

In the country’s health care system faces enormous challenges from the rising number of cases of diabetes. The influx of diabetics requires an army of trained doctors, educators, nutritionists, psychologists, and emergency medical technicians. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The complications of diabetes are devastating and require even more resources to treat heart disease, kidney failure, and retinopathy. And that requires additional hospitals, intensive care units, operating rooms, dialysis machines, and the list goes on.

But is that really the best alternative? A much better alternative would be to take actions to curb the epidemic of obesity. Increasing the resources used to fight diabetes does the opposite as people will know that state-of-the art medical treatment is available and will be less concerned about diabetes. How was the drunk driving epidemic addressed? Was the answer more police on patrol for drunk drivers? Actually that was partially the answer but education and stiff penalties changed the behavior of individuals over time and lowered the rate of drunk driving. Perhaps tactics similar to those that got people to stop drinking so much could also be effective in preventing them from overeating which causes obesity and dramatically increases the risk of diabetes.