Diabetes is the most important public health problem in the U.S. and most of the developed world. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts that one of every three Americans born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes.
The most common form of diabetes by far is type 2, which describes at least 85% of cases. It’s less serious than type 1 diabetes. Type 1 diabetics have an immune system abnormality that destroys the pancreas’s ability to make insulin. Type 1’s will not last long without insulin injections. On the other hand, many type 2 diabetics live well without insulin shots.
The epidemic of diabetes in the U.S. and the developed world overwhelmingly involves type 2, not type 1. The focus of this book is type 2 diabetes and prediabetes. "Prediabetes" is what you'd expect: a precursor that may become full-blown diabetes over time. Blood sugar levels are above average, but not yet into the diabetic range. One in four people with prediabetes develops type 2 diabetes over the course of three to five years. Researchers estimate that 30% of the adult U.S. population had prediabetes in 2006. That's one out of every three adults. Only 7% of them (less than one in 10) were aware they had it.
The rise of diabetes parallels the increase in overweight and obesity, which in turn mirrors the prominence of refined sugars and starches throughout our food supply. These trends are intimately related. Public health authorities 40 years ago convinced us to cut down our fat consumption in a mistaken effort to help our hearts. We replaced fats with body-fattening carbohydrates that test the limits of our pancreas to handle them. Diabetics and prediabetics fail that test....