Did You Miss World Diabetes Day?

Yesterday was World Diabetes Day.

Sponsored by the World Health Organization’s International Diabetes Federation (IDF), the purpose of this one day a year campaign is to raise global awareness of diabetes, its escalating rates globally and how to prevent its spread.

The IDF is spending millions of dollars to “get the word out” about how we can halt and reverse the spread of diabetes, particularly Type 2, which represents 90-95% of all cases and is a huge threat to our health and the world economy.

How WHO plans to defeat diabetes:

As far as I can tell by its World Diabetes Day website, the World Health Organization is planning to “raise awareness” of the current diabetes pandemic by encouraging everyone to wear blue tee-shirts, blue rubber bracelets (“Think Blue. Wear Blue.”) and pass along this WDD campaign video:

Please view their video because I need some help here.

Specifically, what the heck is the IDF trying to communicate? And how is this message going to stop the diabetes juggernaut that now affects 400 million people worldwide?

If you have a clue, please enlighten me in the Comments section below – because I totally missed “the message.”

Maybe that’s because there really wasn’t one

The message in the IDF video seems to be that “talking about diabetes to each other” will halt it. (That’s the “awareness” part, right?)

And that being a “diabetes talker” will bestow upon you the weird blue halo shown in the video.

O-k-aaa-y.

Now, look carefully at the WWD video and see if you can identify the diabetes solution that is being passed from talker to talker.

See those little icons of people running, swimming and exercising?

So that’s what’s going to save us from this global diabetes epidemic: more exercise and physical activity.

You can see their epic solution below on one of the posters the IDF is distributing for WDD:

More exercise isn’t the solution to diabetes

The IDF “solution” is the same one that first lady Michelle Obama presented to the country in her “Let’s Move” campaign?

Let me say this as politely as I can…

This is politically correct brainwash.

Telling people they have Type 2 diabetes because they don’t exercise enough is blaming the victim because he/she is, well … lazy.

While it’s true that exercise can prevent and even reverse obesity and Type 2, you have to do a lot of it to receive these benefits.

I’m talking many hours every day.

Poor diet is the real cause of Type 2 diabetes

Without an upgrade in their diet, people can exercise till the cows come home and still not reverse their diabetes.

One effect of exercise is that it makes you hungry. And as long as people keep satisfying their hunger with sugary sodas and sports drinks, sandwiches and french fries, and a little dessert as a reward for working out, they’re going to be consuming more calories than they burned — and driving up their blood sugar and glucose at the same time.

BTW … The fact that exercise stimulates our appetites is why many fast-food restaurants add playgrounds to their property. Corporate food psychologists know that when kids play five minutes and burn 50 calories, they’re more likely to go inside and gobble 500 or even 1,000 calories worth of food.

Let’s get serious about stopping diabetes

Only by abstaining from the fattening carbohydrate “products” (no way can you honestly call them foods) can you lose weight and stay slim. Ingestible products such as sugar and sweets … sodas and sweetened fruit juices … bread and baked goods made from white flour … chips and snacks made from refined grains … pasta, white rice, and white potatoes … are not going to nourish our bodies or help us get healthy.

Eating these fast carbs spike your sugar which triggers more insulin.

And because insulin won’t let the stored fat out of your cells to be burned as energy, you feel hungry and crave more carbohydrate foods and sugary beverages.

At the same time, your body begins to conserve energy because insulin keeps the fuel locked in your fat cells.

The result is that you eat again. And again.

It’s a vicious cycle.

Eventually your cells become resistant to insulin as your bloodstream remains flooded with glucose. The next step is Type 2 diabetes

And the bigger your body gets, the less energetic you feel. So the last thing you feel like doing is hitting the gym or the jogging trail.

But let’s say you force yourself to exercise because of all the public pressure…

One half-hour on a stair-stepper — or a brisk one-hour walk — burns about 100 calories, the calories in a single slice of white bread!

It’s much easier to blame our current epidemic of obesity and overweight on diabetics themselves for being lazy and slothful – and to pretend that exercising more or eating less will solve the problem.

This way the blame gets passed to the victims.

This is a deceitful smokescreen that protects the companies who are making a killing off the foods and beverages that are making us (and our children) sick, diabetic and obese.

Can you imagine the explosive, vitriolic response from Big Sugar and the entire multibillion-dollar processed-food industry if doctors, scientists, and the White House advised the public against consuming insulin-provoking food products and beverages?

The backlash would be convulsive because these items are the most profitable in America’s supermarkets and vending machines.

This just isn’t fair. Not only do taxpayers pay billions of dollars in Farm Subsidies to keep the prices of these fattening, disease-causing food products artificially low…

…but fast food and soda lobbyists spend millions ($56,771,216 in 2009!) to hide the truth about how harmful their products are to the public’s health. Visit this website to see how much each company actually spent three years ago.

How to really stop the diabetes epidemic

The rapid spread of Type 2 diabetes is a serious threat to our health care system and to the world’s economy.

To stop it, we need straight talk to consumers and to our children. Nothing less is going to move the needle backwards.

Here’s what I think the IDF should really be telling people on World Diabetes Day:

Sodas cause diabetes. A 2010 study conducted by the Harvard school of Public health provides unequivocal scientific proof that regular consumption of soda and other sugary beverages is clearly linked to a greater risk of metabolic syndrome and Type 2 diabetes.

Health officials should launch a robust public educational campaign designed to make drinking sodas as “uncool” as smoking cigarettes.

Professional athletes should sign a pledge not to promote sodas or sugary sports drinks.

Advertisers should be prevented from targeting young children with TV ads using cartoon characters to sell soft drinks and sugary beverages.

Sugar is toxic. Sugar should be outed as the greatest killer in the modern American diet. The truth is slowly leaking out, but we need more honest health coverage in the mainstream media. One hopeful sign was the scathing expose televised on 60 Minutes recently in which Dr. Sanjay Gupta called sugar “toxic” and accused it of being the villain responsible for the current epidemics of Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, stroke, hypertension, and a plethora of other medical conditions that are bankrupting our healthcare system by crippling and killing millions of us every year.

A recent study published in the medical journal Circulation found men who consumed a 12-ounce sugar-sweetened drink every day had a 20% higher risk of heart disease compared to men who didn’t drink them.

“It’s a poison,” states Dr. Robert Lustig, a leading authority on obesity at the University of California, School of Medicine in San Francisco, in a 2009 lecture entitled “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube. Since then, it’s been viewed nearly 1,000,000 times.

In the video, Dr. Lustig explains why sugar is single-handedly responsible for the global explosion of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and many cancers over the past 50 years.

Sugar is addictive. For decades, Big Tobacco denied that nicotine was addictive and that cigarettes caused lung cancer. Today, this is common knowledge.

Years from now, the dangers of sugar will be just as obvious and accepted, but we are in the early stages of this awareness – and Big Sugar is fighting it like crazy.

Just like Big Tobacco’s denial, the sugar and beverage groups aren’t acknowledging that sugar and sweeteners have an addictive side — even though sugar and other sweeteners stimulate the very same part of the brain, called the “reward center” (technically, the striatum), as do nicotine, cocaine, caffeine, and alcohol.

Americans consume an incredible 180 pounds of sugar and other sweeteners annually, on average – much of it “hidden” in processed foods.

This equates to a half-pound of the stuff every single day!

When you track the rise of sugar consumption in the US since 1900 alongside the increase of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and heart disease, the paths are practically identical.

According to Taubes: “In 1980, roughly one in seven Americans was obese, and almost six million were diabetic, and obesity rates, at least, hadn’t changed significantly in the 20 years previously. By the early 2000s, when sugar consumption peaked, one in every three Americans was obese, and 14 million were diabetic.”

Corporate power must be restrained

There’s a reason for the IDF’s wussy WDD campaign yesterday. It knows better than to raise the ire of Big Sugar.

In April 2003, WHO was all set to issue its dietary guidelines on sugar consumption, recommending that calories from sugar be limited to 10% of a person’s diet. In response, the US Sugar Association (comprising more than 300 companies, including Coca-Cola and Pepsico) demanded that Congress withdraw its $406 million support of WHO unless it rescinded its recommendation. (Sadly, the WHO caved.)

WHO executives characterized the Sugar Association’s demands as “blackmail” – and worse than any pressure ever exerted by the tobacco lobby.

But Big Sugar got away with it — just as Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Medicine and Big Food do every single day.

It should be clear to all of us by now that these giant corporations care little (if at all) about our health, well-being and the sustainability of our planet.

Their immense power is nothing to be taken lightly. Last week’s surprising defeat of Proposition 37 in California is a clear indication that they will spend any amount and tell any lie to put forward their selfish agendas.

America needs a modern trust-busting Chief Executive like Teddy Roosevelt or FDR to slip a restraining collar on these behemoths.

I hope we just elected one.

Time will tell, but we can’t remain passive.

Each of us needs to personally boycott the products and services hawked by these irresponsible corporations until they change their selfish ways.

Now, more than ever, we need to stand up for our values and live our beliefs, realizing that honesty and integrity are our most potent defense.

We must speak out against injustice, if only to our family and friends.

We need to write letters, attend protests, testify at public hearings and let our voices be heard.

We need to communicate with each other on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. We need to pass along the petitions and videos and profiles of the everyday heroes who have committed themselves to the causes that are right and just.

And we need to create and sponsor our own public awareness campaigns with courage, daring and creativity.

No more blue faces and blue wristbands, please.