Diabetes: the silent killer among us
SINCE WE ARE in a struggle for civilization, or so our president tells us, let us also talk about a slice of Western civilization that is killing more people than any war. Obesity and type 2 diabetes continue to march toward global domination.
In the United States, we are on track to see life expectancy drop over the next generation. In 1991, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no state had an obesity rate above 20 percent. Today, only four states are below 20 percent. The odds of an American child becoming a diabetic are now 1 in 3. The odds are 1 in 2 for Latinos.
One result is that a federal study this year found a doubling in the longevity gap in the last quarter century between the most-advantaged and the least-advantaged groups. A Harvard study found a life expectancy gap of 30 years between Asian women in Bergen County, N.J., and Native Americans in parts of South Dakota. The life expectancy of middle-income African-Americans (72.9 years) lags 12 years behind that of Asian-Americans (84.9).
The life expectancy of the most unfortunate groups is not that much more than some rates in sub-Saharan Africa and Russia.
This struggle is so serious, it is not clear how long Asian-Americans or any Asians can hang on. The spread of American-style junk food and sedentary lifestyles are leading to a disastrous rise in diabetes in India.
In Chennai, Dr. A. Ramachandran, managing director of a hospital for diabetics, told The
Dr. Paul Zimmet, director of the International Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, said, ``I'm concerned for virtually every country where there's modernization going on because of the diabetes that follows."
The obvious question is whether diabetes and obesity have to be the price of ``progress" and ``modernization." Everyone knows the answer is no. Yet there are no concerted efforts to halt the progress of this modern disease.
For instance, the federal government says that the average young adult should only eat 2,300 milligrams of salt a day. The average middle-aged person should only consume 1,500 milligrams a day. Instead, the level of sodium intake, primarily through processed foods, has risen to 4,000 milligrams a day for men and 2,853 milligrams for women.
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute said that if the sodium in processed meals and restaurant food were cut in half, 150,000 lives could be saved with reductions in heart disease and stroke. Health specialists have tried in vain for a quarter-century to get salt reduced in foods. The salt industry clearly has played a game of getting people hooked on high-sodium foods and then whines that no one will buy their low-salt products (while all the time lobbying the government never to cut the salt).
Dr. Christopher Murray, the lead author of the life-expectancy gap study, recently told the Globe, ``If we're able to deliver [AIDS drugs] to rural Zambia, why can't we manage cholesterol and blood pressure in rural Mississippi?"
If we really have lost 150,000 people a year due to high salt for 25 years, that adds up to 3.75 million people. That is the rough equivalent of the populations of either Oregon, Oklahoma, or Connecticut.
Such numbers resurrect the memory of Native Americans being decimated by the diseases of the ``civilizing" Europeans. We are spreading tragedy again, as our excess calories interact with computer-driven work and sedentary computer and television entertainment.
The convenience of fast food and the wizardry of electronic gizmos were originally sold to us as part of the good life. But when amputees from diabetes keep getting younger and younger, it is clear that too much of the good life is very bad. It cannot be an accident that in this country the populations suffering the worst from this aspect of civilization are Native Americans (again) and low-income African-Americans.
In India, the worst hit populations are the classes benefiting the most from globalization and modernization. And now
What Schwartz is not saying is that these young, modern people are about to pay the price for progress.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. 
