Nearly 1 in 4 U.S. teens has diabetes or prediabetes!

June 1 2012 by in Diabetes

This is absolutely insane. In less than a decade the number of U.S. kids ages 12-19 with diabetes or prediabetes has skyrocketed from 9 to 23 percent!

TIME: Nearly 1 in 4 U.S. Teens Has Diabetes or Prediabetes

If anyone wants a reason why real action is needed, here it is. Talk about a public health emergency! The old advice about more exercise (or “Let’s Move”), balanced junk food diets and tiny changes is obviously not enough.

22 comments

Top comment

Mel
June 1 2012 4
Doesn't surprise me.

It'll start getting better once we stop fearing real food, saturated fats, Butter, meats, eggs, cheese, and start looking at those "low fat", or "fat free" products for what they really are.

We're scared of real food. My dad who used to guzzle soda (He "gave up" so much, so it was his "fat free indulgence"). would be terrified of using butter. Trim every speck of fat off his meats and only choose the leanest cuts to begin with.

He's not alone, people are terrified of fat. You should hear what some people whisper to each-other about my grocery belt of real food.- "OMG look at all the fat. It'll catch up to her". If I look over at the person making such a comment, often their cart includes things like full sugar soda, candies, tarts, sweetened low fat yogurts, sugary cereals.

I tell everyone I can about Gary Taubes "Why We Get Fat and What to do About it" I bought a copy for my parents, and I even have a couple extra copies to loan out. Education will be key. Keep writing, keep sharing the science and successes. We will win.

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1
Howard
June 1 2012 3
The cause of this "public health emergency" is government. Specifically, a Liberal idiot named McGovern, who foisted upon all of us the misguided opinions of a quack named Pritikin.

The solution is NOT more government.
2
Rachel
June 1 2012 2
That is insane. And they will continue to blame it on the fatty McDonald's hamburgers.....
3
Mel
June 1 2012 4
Doesn't surprise me.

It'll start getting better once we stop fearing real food, saturated fats, Butter, meats, eggs, cheese, and start looking at those "low fat", or "fat free" products for what they really are.

We're scared of real food. My dad who used to guzzle soda (He "gave up" so much, so it was his "fat free indulgence"). would be terrified of using butter. Trim every speck of fat off his meats and only choose the leanest cuts to begin with.

He's not alone, people are terrified of fat. You should hear what some people whisper to each-other about my grocery belt of real food.- "OMG look at all the fat. It'll catch up to her". If I look over at the person making such a comment, often their cart includes things like full sugar soda, candies, tarts, sweetened low fat yogurts, sugary cereals.

I tell everyone I can about Gary Taubes "Why We Get Fat and What to do About it" I bought a copy for my parents, and I even have a couple extra copies to loan out. Education will be key. Keep writing, keep sharing the science and successes. We will win.
4
Maggan A
June 1 2012 3
wow! The worlds superpowercountry no 1 is slowly eating herself to death. China, North Korea and Al quaida kan just sit back on their asses and watch you do it. No need anymore for nuclear bombs and/or terrorism - You will fix their "problem" yourself USA :-O
5
mezzo
June 1 2012
Maggan, you are on to something there. Why not start nutrition warfare on Al Quaida? Find sponsors who deliver pop tarts, fizzy drinks, sugar-coated cereals, candies, sweetened yogurts etc. etc. free of charge to their camps and watch them wither away...
6
Maggan A
June 1 2012
mezzo

yes a very good idea. You should know by now that i works domestic - it should work just as good elsewhere,,,
7
Chooky
June 1 2012 2
What I don't like about this article is the numbers are based in some sense on the flawed logic of the status quo health community. In other words, assessing pre-diabetes prevalence by using 'risk factors' like various cholesterol measurements that I don't believe are really linked in the first place. I'd be curious to know what the actual number is of kids who HAVE diabetes as tested by the glucose fasting or glucose tolerance tests. I can't find the press release on the CDC website to see if this number is provided and if it is increasing.
8
Steve
June 1 2012
Nah Mezzo, just send some bacon to al Qaeda!! LOL
9
Maggan A
June 1 2012
Steve

fine eccept for the fact that you got it totaly wrong. Better send them coke, cornflakes and fatfree youghurt loaded with shugar.
10
Yoly Erva
June 1 2012
Great explanation on this post on sugars and their dangers.

Dr. Oz on Sweeteners: Sugar, Fructose, Insulin/Resistance, AGE, Fatty Liver

http://coolinginflammation.blogspot.com/2012/05/dr-oz-on-sweeteners-s...
11
Ted Hutchinson
June 1 2012 1
Exporting obesity: US farm and trade policy and the transformation of the Mexican consumer food environment.
I think the policy of using food exports to ruin the health of other countries is already well under way.
This is also worth reading
The big issue is ultra-processing
It seems reasonable to me to add a tax to so called "food" items that don't carry any nutritional value.
We tax alcohol to deter overconsumption I can't see why ultra processed items shouldn't be taxed at the same rate.
I don't think we can afford the health care costs that will result from not dealing with the problem before it gets out of control. Diabetes doubles the risk of Dementia so the long term costs of doing nothing simply aren't affordable.
12
Ted Hutchinson
June 1 2012
@ Chooky Prevalence of Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors Among US Adolescents, 1999−2008 Free full text online.
13
Brigitta
June 1 2012 1
Woa, I think she needs to get that rash looked at :-/
14
Mike W
June 2 2012
DietDoc is right: that 23% figure is insane. As in, I don't believe it.

If you read the paper (in the link Ted H provided), you'll see that even the paper's authors don't buy that diabetes/prediabetes number. For one thing, it's based on a single fasting glucose reading; if it's over 99 the kid is deemed at least prediabetic. Secondly, the time progression in table 3 shows that diabetic rate going all over the place in the past decade: 9% in 2000. 15% in 2002. 13% in 2004. 16% in 2006. And 23% in 2008. Come on, there's no way the actual diabetes prevalence is jumping around like that in a 2-year span! Something's wrong with their methodology.

Not to say we should be complacent about any Type 2 diabetes appearing in children. But let's not get swept away by hysterical headlines.
15
Jean
June 2 2012 2
Ted,

I would rather see the government stop subsidizing corn, wheat and soy. Once they start taxing the foods you don't like, it opens the door to taxing the ones you do, like dairy, meat and butter. Conventional wisdom says those are "bad" foods. Let's not go there.
16
NS
June 2 2012
Sugar and starch are definitely culprits here. But there are other, more insidious, less talked about, and perhaps impossible to overcome factors behind the diabesity epidemic in the States and around the world, stealth bacterial and viral infections. Unfortunately, things will get much worse before there is any hope that they can get better. While hardly anyone believes it now, in the future people will realize that you can in fact "catch" diabetes, obesity, MS, and other diseases. Diabetes is after all autoimmunological dysfunction, albeit one that can be tempered by lifestyle changes. This dysfunction in many cases is not that different fundamentally in concept from the 'acquired immune dysfunction' of another depressing condition we all know of.

See these:

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v4/n7/abs/nm0798-781.html

http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v34/n9/full/ijo201077a.html

http://www.zen-bio.com/pubs/A%20Human%20Adenovirus%20Enhances%20Pread...

http://www.mendeley.com/research/acute-effect-of-infection-by-adipoge...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_diseases_associated_with_i...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1127336/Now-CATCH-obesity--...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Potbelly-Syndrome-Obesity-Diabetes/dp/15912...
17
Bill
June 2 2012 1
Mike W:

If you look at the data in Table 6 in the free paper that Ted kindly provided a link to, and plot a simple graph of the % with diabetes (9, 15, 13, 16, 23) against time, you can see that the general trend is increasing, and that the rate of increase is also increasing! However, the number of adolescents surveyed each year is decreasing (n = 788, 797, 744, 692, 362) which means that the actual number of kids with diabetes or pre-diabetes in the study is decreasing! Is this because more of the healthy kids are dropping out of the study? Who knows!That's one of the problems with statistics like these, the relationship you may be trying to show is never nice and neat, and you could interpret pretty much what you like to prove or disprove a hypothesis...

Lies, damn lies, and statistics ;-)

My wife eventually came over to the "dark side"; she found my lack of carbs disturbing.....
18
TheFatNurseRN
June 2 2012
I did a post on this last month along with the kind of training (eat more whole grain carbs, less fat!) I was taught to help diabetics: http://thefatnurse.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/1-in-4-teens-pre-diabetic...
19
Galina L.
June 2 2012 1
@NS,#16

It is the chicken and egg situation. What came first? There is a correlation between susceptibility to viral and bacterial infections and autoimmunity deceases and our metabolic health. After switching on a LC diet at the age of 46 yo almost 5 years ago, I had NO ONE seasonal flue, bronchitis, urinary tract infection, yest infection. Asthma gone too, even it is not an infectious decease, but a autoimmunological dysfunction. All that used to be a problem. So , in order to avoid getting diabetes, MS and what not your have to avoid catching "stealth bacterial and viral infections", according to your links. Experience of many on LC diets led to the conclusion that the avoidance of sugars and starches could be useful for such purpose as well. Unrestricted carbohydrate consumption continues to look like a culprit from every angle you look at it.
20
NS
June 3 2012
It's great that LC worked for you. I suspect it can work to some degree for many. But it is hardly a cure. Imagine telling AIDS patients just to eat LC and go away. There are at least 17 million people worldwide "officially" with ME/CFS alone, not including GWS or Lyme disease. Many of these people have unresolvable symptoms including obesity that does not resolve even on VLC diets. And scariest of all, so many of these patients have siblings, relatives, and even close friends with similar symptoms. Here's a hypothetical for you: Would HIV have even been identified if it didn't kill? The world of stealth infectious pathogens is far more bleak than anybody recognizes.

Until the scientific/medical community are able to recognize these conditions and devise some treatment to deal with it - antibiotics, antivirals, immunomodulators, etc.. - the numbers will explode and the diabesity you see today will look like a cake walk in the future. As I said previously, "catching" obesity will be recognized in the future.
21
Galina L.
June 4 2012
I don't think that limiting carbs is an instant cure tor HIV, for example. I am not alone to notice that LC diet makes people much more resistant to all kinds of infections. I just want to communicate, that in at least some cases the arrival of extremely potent pathogens looks like the effect of growing occurrence of an insulin resistance and a diabesity in population, not over-wise, because people with blood sugar problems are more susceptible to get seek after an exposure to a virus or bacteria. The infection gets aggressively treated, and the more potent pathogens get created in a process. VLC diet is not the universal cure for a weight loss, btw, mostly because it will not guarantees the lowest blood sugar level in a healthy range due to a hepatic insulin resistance, common in many people with not-perfect metabolism. Limiting carbohydrates normalizes a lot in our body and will definitely provide an extra fighting chance to the infected people. I can't imagine telling AIDS patients just to eat LC and everything goes away, but I will find it to be very reasonable to tell a patient with a hard-to-fight infection that the diet that keeps his blood sugar in a low range creates less favorable environment for the infection. May be even metformine can be a reasonable addition to the treatment in the cases when blood sugar is hard to control.
22
NS
June 5 2012
Yes Galina,

Thank you for your positive comments. I agree with most of what you say. And for sure LC diets go a long way in helping, especially in terms of BS reduction. Metformin is a good tool too. BTW, before AZT was developed, doctors sometimes used amino acids - glutamine, carnitine, cysteine, etc. to treat patients with some limited success. That bodes well I think for LC and LCHF in general, but, like with HIV, that won't be enough. There is unfortunately a whole world of misery and suffering from viral infections that people are unaware of. That will change in the future of course as more get sick and after there are extreme increases in suffering and misery. Then the arrogant CDC will say, "oh, I'm sorry." Look at the US DOD. They denied for more than two decades the existence of GWS. Now, they don't dare.

Like I mentioned before, I think if HIV didn't kill, but just slowly deteriorate its victims, doctors wouldn't have identified it and half the world would have it. That is exactly the situation for CFS.

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