Is diabetes the new death sentence for the African-American community?

Diabetes may be the death of the African-American community. We think it’s guns or drugs, but really it is diabetes. Diabetes is at an all time high with 57 million Americans nationwide with diabetes and another 26 million walking around undiagnosed with the disease. Why is diabetes so bad in the African-American community? According to the National Diabetes Fact Sheet, 11.8 percent of African-Americans have diabetes. Many of them might have avoided this danger if they had stuck with a healthy diet and scheduled regular exercise.

Obesity is a big contributing factor towards diabetes. In America, an estimated 72 million individuals – 26 percent of the population – are obese. That is 1 in 4 Americans. The obesity guidelines are factored according to the Body Mass Index scale which states that obesity starts at 30 percent of our ideal body weight. Do African Americans really understand what a BMI means?

Obesity is out of control because everywhere you look the food in the African American community is loaded with fat and calories and served up in fast food restaurants. Why is it that everything we want today has to be delivered in seconds? Families can’t even wait for fresh vegetables to cook. We have plenty of fast food, greasy-spoon restaurants and too few groceries selling fresh fruits and vegetables in our community. For many blacks, this could end up being a death sentence.

I know a lot about diabetes because I was once a diabetic. Weighing in at 320 pounds, I couldn’t walk one block. I was taking insulin shots and oral medications that I thought would help me control the diabetes. Then I realized change would come only when I decided whether I wanted to live or die. I took control of my health and my food choices. I’m diabetes free now and I know medications or those dreaded insulin shots didn’t make me that way.

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Doctor Claims That Foods Contribute to Diabetes More Than Weight

Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has previously cited obesity as a primary factor in an individual's risk for diabetes, Dr. Stefan Ripich suggests that a poor diet can play a much larger role in the chance of developing this condition.

Specifically, the foods that are high on the Glycemic Index (GI) can be responsible for spikes in blood sugar levels that may lead to diabetes, as they are broken down into glucose very quickly. Many high-ranking items on the GI include refined carbohydrates or white flour.

Dr. Ripich states that many Americans are also on a high-carbohydrate diet, which can be the main culprit in these problems. "The real… solution is eliminating fast-action carbs such as sweetened food and beverages, plus refined carbohydrates – while eating more slow-acting carbohydrates, such as greens, vegetables and whole grains, and other fiber-rich foods," he said.

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Multivitamins don't reduce diabetes risk

Vitamins and supplements are big business in the US Half of Americans routinely take them to the tune of about $23 billion dollars every year. Yet the science demonstrating health benefits to support such widespread use is often contradictory or lacking. In the case of a large NIH-backed study published in the journal Diabetes Care, the science shows little benefit, at least in reducing an adult's risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

An international group of researchers from the US and China were interested in exploring the potential benefits of regular vitamin and supplement use in reducing a person's likelihood of developing diabetes. Existing research had suggested that some of the same biological mechanisms involved in developing both heart disease and diabetes might be offset by antioxidant vitamins and minerals.

To see whether vitamins could protect against type 2 diabetes, researchers from the National Institutes of Health, AARP, Harvard Medical School and the Chinese Academy of Medical Science analyzed health data from 232,007 participants in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study, gathered in 1995-1996 and followed up in 2000.

This large group of older Americans, ranging from 50 to 71 years old and all diabetes-free at the start of the study, answered questions about regular vitamin and supplement use, general health, weight, race, age, gender, education, marital status and lifestyle habits such as exercise, diet, and smoking.

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