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.