D still growing very fast

[skb]

Cases have gone up 4 times in the past 25 years. Keep that up, and soon there will be more diabetics than non-diabetics. Read the CBS News story here.

[Shanny]

And yet the official agencies & medical communities of most countries, while admitting that carbs raise blood sugar, still reject LCHF as a first basic recommendation. I will never be able to wrap my head around this. All I can guess is that the pharmaceutical & agriculture industries have them so squashed under their thumbs that the truth will never become the official prescription.

[skb]

Yesterday there was a large advert in the local papers here, about some government initiative to curb diabetes and one of the highlighted points was to "restrict salt, sugar and carbohydrate intake".
Not really there, but a good start, nevertheless.

[starsign]

Yes I had also seen that and smiled.

[Timewise]

I saw all the 'hype'!  Pure Government propaganda, using the old 'numbers game'.   They did not account for the Baby Boomers, historically the largest group population in history (excluding the millennials).  Baby boomers are aging and are now either retired or about to retire.  Type 2 diabetes will onset as we age, more than when we were younger, therefore looking just at the "Total" number of diabetics is very misleading unless you take into account other factors....which of course these Government press releases do not!

I agree we probably have more diabetics than every before, but the population is aging more than ever before, and that is only one factor to consider.  What about eating habits, medications, etc. etc.

All just propaganda.....

[patdart]

I think we need to realize that the Baby Boomers are the ones who've been living during the dawn of TV Dinners and processed foods more than any other group.  I'm convinced that it plays a role (a big one?) in the explosion of Diabetes.  After all, Pablum was used along with sugared  jared baby foods when they were babies, processed foods greeted with joy by working mothers, Coke widespread in their adolescent, etc.  I'm 76 and it was a real treat to have a coke, but now it is a daily or more ordinary drink.  Skim milk rather than whole milk became the rage when fat was shunned in the 50's-60's and margarine rather than butter.  I was about 12 when my g'mother tried the new "margarine" and I got to mix the yellow powder in the lard looking stuff.

My point is that they grew up eating in ways that the earlier generations never did and what we are seeing with them is a lifetime of eating that we've never seen before and the results will be different.  Their results will be an amazing thing.

[Timewise]

Pat Dart....I agree that our history of how and what we ate plays a role.  I believe poor eating speeds the onset and maybe the severity of diabetes, but I still also believe that it is genetically driven.  If you have the genetics you will be diabetic, it just depends on when it hits you.   To believe that life style and diet determine if you are going to be diabetic ignore all the research on genetics and diabetes.

I believe that many of our parents, mine included had diabetes later in life but were not properly diagnosed.   

We probably will not know the 100% for sure answer here if our lifetime (I'm 66 next month)....but it all is interesting to watch as the media, scientists and doctors swim in conjunction with the drug money.....sad but true!

[patdart]

No argument there about genetics, but I believe what we eat makes such a strong role that we have to bow to it's role in when it strikes and also recognize that our habits via daily exercise play a large role in our timing in the development as well as our longer lifespan plays a role.  It's a complicated conundrum but I do believe the changes in my life the last 20 years hastened mine.  Bread baking, eating differently since I was widowed, etc. made a difference I'm sure.  Living a farm life and eating what I could grow would have led me in a different direction.

Boomers haven't known that life and therefore haven't had the same story.  Hence, my concern with my children's BS!

[Shalynne]

Diabetes runs rampant on both sides of my family.  Because my family (both sides) is ... complicated ... I had no real insight into this history until I was in my late 40s, which was back in the 00s.  Some 7-8 years prior to my own diagnosis.

From what I've since been able to learn about the history, many of the non-diabetics in my family tree were most likely (like Timewise's family) undiagnosed diabetics. 

But back in the 00s, I did not really know what my history meant, or what to do about it.  I believed in "healthy whole grains and fruit-fruit-fruit."

While the "Boomer diet," especially since the late 70s definitely provoked my diabetes to develop at least a decade earlier than those who had gone before me ... well ... I would have developed diabetes sometime past my mid-60s, anyway.  Unless, maybe, I'd been on a strict LCHF way of eating since toddlerhood.  And that's just a maybe.