The US is headed for a diabetes epidemic that could see as many as 41
million Americans suffering from full-blown diabetes if prevention
measures are not put into place, announced Health and Human Services
Secretary Tommy Thompson. Right now, 18 million Americans have
full-blown diabetes, which already makes the disease an epidemic. But if
nothing is done to reverse the trend, this number will more than double
in the years ahead.
What can be done to stop this diabetic epidemic?
Fundamentally, we have to look at what causes diabetes in the first
place. And there's no mystery about that: people become diabetic due to
natural cause-and-effects laws concerning food choice and physical
exercise. If you eat certain foods while avoiding physical exercise, you
will automatically become diabetic over time. It's certainly not a
medical mystery.
The solution, then is straightforward: avoid eating
the foods that cause obesity and diabetes. That means people should
avoid all refined white flour, refined white sugar, high fructose corn
syrup, milled grains and other processed carbohydrates. Instead, they
should turn to natural herbal sweeteners like stevia and xylitol, and of
course natural forms of sweets like apples, strawberries and carrots.
The second part of the solution involves physical exercise: people need
to walk or engage in cardiovascular exercise for one hour a day, six
days a week. Adding a strength training component would further
accelerate their health progress and prevent them from becoming
diabetic.
The hard part in all this is not declaring what needs to
change, it's getting organized medicine to start supporting that change.
See, the pharmaceutical industry sees the diabetes epidemic as an
opportunity for profit. If twice as many people become diabetic in the
years ahead, the drug industry can look forward to doubling their sales
of insulin, syringes, and all sorts of drugs for treatment of everything
from diabetic neuropathy to problems with the pancreas. To them, the
coming wave of diabetes is a tremendous opportunity for profit.
Simultaneously, there's no profit whatsoever for drug companies when it
comes to prevention. In fact, if prevention is widely taught and
followed, the pharmaceutical industry would lose hundreds of millions of
dollars in profit.
It is for precisely these reasons that there is
no push towards nutrition, exercise and disease prevention. All the
money -- along with the hype, the headlines, the TV commercials and the
medical journals -- are focused primarily on how to treat those diseases
once they become full-blown profit generators. It's sad, but absolutely
true.
With the right advice, the right motivations, and major
changes in the food supply, the U.S. population wouldn't even need
pharmaceutical companies. The drug industry is one that depends on
chronic disease for its own survival, and we'd all be better off if we
were so healthy that chronic disease was a rarity rather than the norm.
The drug industry claims to be helping people, but in fact it is
primarily feeding off peoples' unnecessary suffering. If we took all the
drug money being accumulated by pharmaceutical companies and invested it
in public education about nutrition and fitness, we wouldn't need all
those drugs after all. A healthy nation is one with a very tiny
pharmaceutical industry.
About the author: Mike Adams is a consumer health advocate and award-winning journalist with a strong interest in personal health, the environment and the power of nature to help us all heal He is a prolific writer and has published thousands of articles, interviews, reports and consumer guides, reaching millions of readers with information that is saving lives and improving personal health around the world. Adams is an honest, independent journalist and accepts no money or commissions on the third-party products he writes about or the companies he promotes. In mid 2010, Adams produced NaturalNews.TV, a natural health video sharing website offering user-generated videos on nutrition, green living, fitness and more. He's also the CEO of a highly successful email newsletter software company that develops software used to send permission email campaigns to subscribers. Adams volunteers his time to serve as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and regularly pursues cycling, nature photography, Capoeira and Pilates. Known on the 'net as 'the Health Ranger,' Adams shares his ethics, mission statements and personal health statistics at www.HealthRanger.org
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Wednesday, May 12, 2004
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