Memphis is making progress in war on diabetes
It is too soon to proclaim that a corner has been turned, but measurable progress in the rate at which Memphians are diagnosed with diabetes should encourage more of us to eat a healthier diet and live a more active lifestyle.
New diabetes cases diagnosed in Shelby County, The Commercial Appeal’s Tom Charlier reported, fell nearly 19 percent from 2008 to 2013, the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has statistics.
Not coincidentally, CDC also reported a slight dip in the county’s obesity rate, from 34.7 percent in 2011 to 32.3 percent two years later.
How much credit goes to healthier eating and how much to more exercise is not clear, but in either case driving the diabetes rate down has been a heavy lift in a city whose cultural touchstones include the promotion and consumption of barbecued pork.
Even people with Type 2 diabetes can experience an improvement in health when they embrace a whole-foods, plantbased diet, limiting meat and processed foods, according to Dr. Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. While people often believe sugar triggers diabetes, current research indicates that too much fat is a more likely cause.
Patients in the pre-diabetes stage in some cases have years in which to change their habits in a way that can prevent their progression to Type 2 diabetes without prescription drugs.
Obesity and sedentary lifestyles put individuals at greater risk of incurring the disease, which is also more prevalent among those with a family history of diabetes and certain ethnic groups, including African-Americans.
It is far too early to celebrate progress on the diabetes front in Memphis. In 2013, CDC data shows, 12.2 percent of the adult population had the disease, up from 9.4 percent in 2004 and well above 10.6 percent and 11.2 percent in Davidson and Knox counties, respectively.
The trend is reflected in the proliferation of dialysis treatment centers, especially in neighborhoods where demographic factors associated with the disease are prevalent, as well as an acute demand in the Memphis area for kidney transplants due to high rates of hypertension, diabetes and obesity.
The situation was one of the factors that in 2015 prompted leaders of some 60 agencies and groups to launch the Community Health Improvement Plan, aimed at making Shelby County “one of the healthiest places in the nation” by tackling problems such as obesity, diabetes and violence.
That is indeed a lofty goal. But any progress toward that goal should help raise awareness of what people at risk of the disease can avoid — the nerve damage, the blindness, the kidney disease, heart trouble and, among 250 people in Shelby County each year, death.
Communitywide efforts can reduce the financial burden imposed by diabetes, which results in up to $135,600 more in lifetime medical costs for people diagnosed with the disease than those without it, according to a 2014 study.
All from a disease that science has determined can be prevented in many cases, even among those whose blood sugar levels have reached the pre-diabetic stage, with simple changes in what we eat and how we live our lives.