Yesterday’s final installment in the New York Times’ brilliant diabetes series covers how Asian immigrants and their children are increasingly vulnerable to the disease after coming to live in the United States.
This news is especially alarming because, according to journalist Marc Santora’s piece, far-Eastern Asians develop type 2 diabetes at lower rates than people of other ethnic backgrounds. For example, a Japanese man who’s 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighs only 156 pounds is twice as likely as a white man that size to contract diabetes. Overall, people of Asian descent are 60% more likely than whites to become diabetic.
Another worrisome statistic: 14% of Asian children in New York are obese, which is more than double the rate of their parents. The Times article attributes this to several factors: the bombardment of American kids with TV ads for sugary, fatty, unhealthy foods; the easy availability of fast food (Santoro writes that there are five fast food joints–McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Joe’s Best Burger–in a 100-yard stretch of a street in Flushing, a neighborhood in Queens), and the appalling lack of exercise New York kids get, largely due to budget cuts that curtail physical education programs at schools.
While Santora’s piece centers on Asian Americans, the issues it raises are relevant–and frightening–for anyone. For starters, it seems government has little or no sense of urgency about the diabetes epidemic. The Times also reports that only $1.9 million of New York’s $100-million budget goes to diabetes prevention and control.
Further, Santora reveals that 31,000 U.S. schools are so desperate for cash to fund exercise programs that they let McDonald’s underwrite them–a mindboggling irony, since many experts believe that fast food is a primary culprit for rising rates of obesity and diabetes. In exchange for McDonald’s largesse, these schools must allow the fast-food giant to stamp the Golden Arches on every single piece of literature the children in these programs see.
Again, this is an irony too painful to contemplate, linking physical fitness to junk food in the minds of impressionable kids. Nationwide, Santora writes, daily particpation in gym classes has dropped from 42% in 1991 to 28% in 2003, according to statistics he got from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Santora’s article, like the the first three in the series, is simultaneously enlightening and infuriating, and I hope together they are a wake up call to all individuals and parents, not just medical professionals and government officials.
The good news is that people can be empowered to change their lives and reduce their risk of diabetes. Maybe the sobering statistics and sad profiles the New York Times revealed this week will inspire more people to change their lives.
Thanks again to Jennifer Moore, for writing this while I’m steeped in work relating to my Fast-Track, Kick-Sugar Countdown Program. To get in free to the program for a limited time, just visit www.KickSugarSpecial.com.