An Ounce of Prevention Worth Several Pounds of Cure: How to Prevent Diabetes
In recent years, diabetes has emerged as a serious epidemic in our society. It has an unfortunate relation to the rise of fast-food commercialism and technology of convenience. In efforts to prevent our world from resembling that of which Pixar conceived of in Wall-E (which really only addressed the effects of unhealthy eating and laziness on physical appearance), the matter of how to prevent diabetes has now taken center-stage as an urgent problem to be addressed.
In this context, diabetes refers to diabetes mellitus, or type II diabetes. While type I has to do with a lack of blood sugar, type II involves an excess of glucose in the bloodstream, understandably due to making unhealthy food choices and participating in less physical activity. This is perhaps best exemplified by the drive-thru at your local fast-food restaurant, which is basically consuming food packed with unnecessary calories without abandoning the comfortable cushiness of your car seat.
When attacking the problem of how to prevent diabetes, youll find that the solution is quite simple: to eat healthy and exercise regularly. If thats all it takes, why is diabetes still such a serious problem? The answer may lie in the adage, easier said than done. The issue isnt that we dont know what to do. The problem is that we cant pick ourselves up in order to do what needs to be done.
However, this may lead some to pin the blame on the victims themselves. It's the obese who are really at risk by allowing themselves to become overweightwhy cant they just stop eating too much and moving around too little, you might say. And its true; we have a choice in what we put into our bodies and the actions our bodies make. But to invoke another adage, correlation does not imply causation. Sure, theres definitely a relationship between obesity and diabetes, but consider the possibility that there might be an outside source mediating this link.
How about the fact that were constantly bombarded, day to day, by an overload of fast-food advertisements and new, ever-evolving technological advances designed to take away yet more responsibility in favor of greater comfort? Living requires us to interact with the environment surrounding us. What if we wiped out all of the milkshakes, McDonalds, home deliveries and highways from existence? Even people who wanted to make unhealthy, lazy choices wouldnt be able to do so because they would be living in an environment that didnt give them that option. Thus learning how to prevent diabetes wouldnt be necessary because in this hypothetical world, developing diabetes would be impossible. But we live in a culture that provides that option willingly and excessively. Worse yet, its a culture that we created. Putting convenience ahead of health and well-beingthis is a choice that we as a society made. In this context, eating right and exercising more is no longer as simple as it once seemed.
So how to prevent diabetes? Depriving ourselves of comfort food and technology is undesirable, and even unwise. Because the problem isnt really that these pleasures exist, but that theyre enjoyed without moderation. Fixing society doesnt happen overnight, and its probably downright impossible. Yet taking a walk instead of driving or skipping the burger in favor of a salad remains within the realm of possibility.