VIDEO: Recognizing common risk factors key aspect of diabetes awareness

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You have to be living in a cave essentially to not hear about diabetes. And most of that, from my point of view as an investigator and someone who's concerned with public health is understandably, but I think to some extent, unfortunately, owing to the advertisements that people see. So what they know is a bunch of people going down the street and dancing and very happy and taking one of the new drugs. The awareness of diabetes that I talked about earlier really needs to be at a populational level where people just understand how toxic being overweight or obese can be. Now again, this is not meant to shame people who are overweight or obese, and we shouldn't, obviously we shouldn't be doing that. But people do need to have a real understanding of how widespread type two diabetes in particular is, and in addition, need to understand that their risk goes up dramatically, as has happened in almost the entire population. Everyone getting older, that's a good thing. But older and heavier and less active is not, is a recipe for people being at risk for developing diabetes. You know, currently it's gone up to just this extraordinary, you know, 35 million people or so in the US, for example, with diabetes, another almost a hundred million with pre-diabetes. Those are the folks that are at increased risk. Their sugar, their glucose levels, sugar levels are on the rise, and they are just substantially higher risk to develop type two diabetes, and so between the two of them, pre-diabetes and diabetes, you're talking about a third of the entire US population and it's more like a half of the adult population. So I think that people need to be aware of the common risk factors that have made this an epidemic and a very costly one. Costly because firstly it ain't going away, and second, because the human suffering that goes along with it, increasing the risk for heart attacks and stroke by twofold at least, and then the increased risk of blindness and kidney disease and amputations and erectile dysfunction and you know, all kinds of things that go along with long-term diabetes. I think people need to be aware of it. This is a disease that's kind of, it's in the background. Oh yes, my grandmother had it kind of thing, but now it's more and more younger people have it. So I think that people need to be aware of how pernicious, how toxic our current environment is, and take all the steps they can to remove that toxicity or reduce it before they end up getting diabetes and needing these drugs.