Notes

Adult Onset Diabetes
Adult-onset diabetes, commonly referred to as Type-2 Diabetes, as it has become more prevalent in the US and it is typically the result of an unhealthy diet. The Mayo Clinic, a non-profit academic medical center in Rochester, Minnesota, explains that Type 2 diabetes is a chronic condition that affects the way your body metabolizes sugar in the body due to the fact that muscle tissue is resistant to the insulin/does not produce enough insulin used to allow the sugar into the muscle (2018). The Center for Disease Control (CDC) has reported that Type-2 Diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States and nearly a third of Americans are at risk of developing the disease as they suffer from a condition called pre-diabetes (CDC, 2017). More and more Americans are suffering from illness, and it is becoming apparent that it is linked to diet.
Though the academic literature and statistics reveal that there is an underlying epidemic, the average person does not fully understand how to actually prevent the disease. It would be important for them to know in order to help themselves. Researchers from the Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health followed 18,527 participants for an average time of 8.7 years, and after seeing the cases of pre-diabetes and incident diabetes, as defined by the American Diabetes Association, the researchers concluded that “higher meat consumption was associated with elevated risk of Type-2 Diabetes,” (Mari-Sanchis, Gea, Basterra-Gortari, Martinez-Gonzalez, Beunza, & Bes-Rastrollo, 2016). It would make more sense to greatly decrease the amount of meat one consumes to combat the rising epidemic.
More serious lifestyle approaches have to be made in order to combat the issue. The New York University Department of Medicine found that dietary choices are accountable for insulin resistance in a sedentary population: large cohort studies have revealed that when the average person decides to decrease animal products, meat, dairy, eggs, and replace them with whole foods PBD, they are able to reverse Type-2 Diabetes (McMacken & Shah, 2017). Replacing meat with PB substitutes helps eliminate some of the risks associated with becoming diabetic, as it allows you to decrease the risk of obesity which has been found to increase the risk for Type-2 Diabetes.