So about 4x as many deaths per year as homicide, twice as many as suicide, twice as many as car crashes, twice as many as accidental falls, and a multiple of plenty of other preventable causes of death. Obviously some of these other types of deaths take far more years off people's lives than diabetes, but I think the author is right to call it an urgent national scandal.
> Her meticulous account depicts the world’s most important diabetes patient advocacy organization as a cynical fund-raising machine, anxious to please its corporate overlords at the expense of the millions of people with diabetes it is supposed to be trying to help. “The defendant’s conduct shows that they were party to a scheme to defraud the American people by approving and endorsing recipes submitted by Splenda to be lauded by the ADA as a healthy choice for people with diabetes, when the ADA knew that those recipes were contrary to the ADA’s guidelines and well-established and emerging scientific principles,” the complaint reads. In case you’re curious, the ADA and Splenda appear to be still at it. As I write this, the ADA’s Diabetes Food Hub web page still features no fewer than 203 recipes – some marked “sponsored”, some not – that include Splenda, whose parent company’s $1m contribution has brought to light the utter insanity of our diabetes epidemic.
I really wish this could have gone to the discovery phase. Hopefully there will be investigations.
> And although type-2 diabetes is often reversible through a low-carbohydrate diet, the ADA and the pharmaceutical industry don’t seem very interested in acknowledging that. Instead, they promote a laundry list of corporate deals and pharmaceutical treatments that have failed to stem the disease’s lethal and expensive impact on American life.
I'm not naïve enough to think that all (or even most) of the tens of thousands of people dying from type 2 diabetes each year would be saved if the ADA didn't give poor advice, but I also think it's wrong to think that it'd have had no impact: insulin has been infamously expensive for many years in the US, and insulin pumps are thousands of dollars. I certainly think some of the millions of people who ended up dying from type 2 diabetes would have made lifestyle changes had it been made clear that it's often reversible with diet changes, if for no other reason than to save money. If you don't have a pump, having to take insulin shots throughout the day is a pain the ass, so again, I think some people would have made lifestyle changes to avoid that had it been made clear that it was an option.