And as our waistlines get bigger, so too does the number of cases of the disease.
An estimated 366 million people have either form of diabetes around the world, about five per cent of the entire planet’s human population, according to the International Diabetes Federation. And thanks to our sugar-rich diets and ever-widening waistlines, that number only stands to get bigger in the near future, with the poor – both in developed and developing countries – standing to get the worst of it. The federation says diabetes kills 4.6 million people a year and drains about $465 billion a year from government coffers. The IDF hopes to make diabetes the focus of an upcoming UN summit on chronic diseases, and with numbers like those… yeah, we can see why.
