THE World Diabetes Day celebrated last November 14, an annual reminder of how diabetes kills, passed barely noticed.
As the Christmas season romps in, let us not forget that all those food that we will be gorging on may not be good for our health. Diabetes is a constant threat. And while two to three decades ago, having diabetes was regarded as a glitch, this disease has become more mainstream as people become bound more and more to their couches, beds, sofas, seats, fingers busy on a gadget or two.
Diabetes is one of four major non-communicable diseases (NCDs) that are becoming more common because of physical inactivity. The other three are cardiovascular disease, cancer, and respiratory diseases. WHO projects that diabetes will be the 7th leading cause of death by 2030.
Risk factors as we are often told are overweight or obesity, an unhealthy diet, and physical inactivity, a combination which accounts for about 80% of the increase in prevalence of diabetes.
More worrying is that Type 2 diabetes, which before was regarded as a disease of middle-aged and elderly people is now increasingly detected in adolescence and childhood. This growing prevalence is strongly associated with childhood obesity. Obesity is not just about gorging on food on a regular basis, it is also about gorging on the wrong kinds of food like junk and not moving much.
Parents, by putting up a lot of restrictions to their children, feeding them fastfood and junkfood regularly, and taking joy in their children's being engrossed with gadgets to shut them up are actually rearing them to be sickly adults.
There is no shortcut to this. Children have to be allowed to be the children we once were; running around even barefoot instead of zapping this and that enemy onscreen, climbing trees and jumping off walls, playing patintero, tigso, tumba-lata, and all those happy games that involved running and shrieking and being "it". The World Health Organization says children need at least one hour of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity every day. Less and less children get this physical stimulation.
Adults, on the other hand, have to sustain a regular exercise regimen that does not unnecessarily put stress on the heart but that which makes for a healthy heart and girth. This means, a regimen to greet the morning and start it right and not a regimen that comes after a stressful day.
The solution is in our hands... rather, on our feet. We just have to do make ourselves and our children do it. Let's all get on our feet and stretch those muscles.