{"id":989436,"date":"2026-07-31T04:18:50","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T04:18:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one2one.health\/2026\/07\/31\/diabetes-is-not-inevitable-unless-we-put-off-these-steps\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T22:49:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T22:49:11","slug":"diabetes-is-not-inevitable-unless-we-put-off-these-steps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one2one.health\/en\/2026\/07\/31\/diabetes-is-not-inevitable-unless-we-put-off-these-steps\/","title":{"rendered":"Diabetes is not inevitable\u2014unless we put off these steps."},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Source: Al Jazeera Net website <\/h5>\n
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Diabetes<\/a>, and the obesity<\/a> that often precedes it, has become one of the world\u2019s greatest disease burdens, with incidence rising fastest in the very same places\u2014including large parts of our region\u2014that until recently considered themselves to have overcome their biggest health threats. <\/p>\n

This is not a story of individual failure. It is a story about how quickly a region\u2019s food supply, cities, and daily habits can change\u2014and how far our health systems still have to go to catch up. <\/p>\n

Two forces are colliding, and the first is good news. <\/b><\/p>\n

Vaccinations, clean water, antibiotics, and improved maternal and child care have achieved what they were designed to do: people now live longer than their parents and grandparents did. <\/p>\n

But living longer means living long enough to face the diseases of ageing and abundance\u2014chief among them diabetes and the obesity that precedes it. This epidemic is, in part, a result of success. <\/p>\n

The second force is a kind of change that receives less attention: what we eat, and how we get it. <\/p>\n

Cheap, calorie-dense, heavily processed foods, sugar-sweetened drinks, and snacks engineered to make overeating easy have steadily displaced traditional diets based on vegetables, legumes, and whole grains\u2014while urbanisation has made walking a rare part of daily life. <\/p>\n

In city after city, unhealthy calories are now cheaper and easier to obtain than healthy calories. Diabetes did not appear out of nowhere; it followed the food supply and the design of our cities. <\/p>\n

It is worth pausing briefly on the impact of this disease, because statistics can make it seem abstract. <\/b><\/p>\n

Diabetes is among the leading causes of death. It is the leading cause of heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure, blindness, and amputations, and it contributes to the deaths of more than a million people each year worldwide\u2014while millions more die from cardiovascular diseases whose progression it accelerates. <\/p>\n

By now, almost every family has lost someone to this disease, or watched someone lose a limb, a kidney, or their sight because of it. <\/p>\n

Beyond deaths, diabetes is a leading cause of disability\u2014and disability here rarely affects only one person: it may be a parent who can no longer work, an adult child reorganising life around dialysis appointments, or a grandmother who needs help with tasks she once did without thinking. <\/p>\n

Many patients also carry a hidden burden in addition to the physical one: the feeling that their illness has become a burden on those they love. This emotional burden deserves the same attention as the clinical side. <\/p>\n

Here is the hopeful part: type 2 diabetes is preventable for most people, and even after it appears, its worst complications can largely be avoided through early detection and ongoing care. <\/p>\n

Weight management, physical activity, and a healthy diet can prevent the disease or delay its onset for most people at risk\u2014and prevention does not require waiting for a diagnosis. <\/p>\n

A simple, inexpensive fasting glucose test or an “HbA1c” test can detect prediabetes years before full diabetes develops\u2014and that window matters: people who know they are in the prediabetes stage, rather than being told vaguely to “eat better”, tend to take the news seriously. <\/p>\n

A specific number is far more motivating than a general warning, and lifestyle changes begun in the prediabetes stage can prevent or delay progression to full diabetes for a large share of people. Screening is a chance to change the course of the story before its hardest chapters are written. <\/p>\n

For the tens of millions of people already living with diabetes, medications are not optional: they are the difference between a normal life and the complications mentioned above. <\/p>\n

The newest and most effective diabetes medicines\u2014including “GLP-1” drugs that also treat obesity\u2014are extraordinary achievements, but their prices, in most of the world, far exceed what an average patient or health system can afford. <\/p>\n

In the United States, a month\u2019s supply of a leading “GLP-1” drug can cost more than $1,000 before any discount; even at the lower cash-pay prices some manufacturers now offer, a single month still costs more than the monthly minimum wage in many low- and middle-income countries. A treatment that works but that most patients cannot afford has not yet fulfilled its promise. <\/p>\n

We have been here before. When effective blood pressure medicines first became widely available decades ago, they transformed health outcomes for those who could pay for them, while patients facing the same risks of stroke and heart failure\u2014but without the necessary financial resources\u2014often went untreated; and without much public debate, health outcomes ended up tracking income as closely as they tracked biological factors. <\/p>\n

Diabetes care now stands at the same crossroads, at a time when this disease is far more widespread than high blood pressure was then. <\/p>\n

This story also carries a second, quieter lesson: even now, when blood pressure medicines have become cheap and widely available, many people with hypertension still do not receive treatment\u2014not because the pills are expensive, but because they were never screened, or they started treatment once and then quietly stopped. <\/p>\n

Affordability alone has never been enough. Diabetes care can learn from both halves of this story at once: making treatment accessible to all, and building a system of screening and follow-up that ensures patients stay on treatment. <\/p>\n

Here is a less comfortable note. Most health systems, for entirely understandable reasons, spend the bulk of their budgets on treatment rather than prevention: you cannot turn away a patient with a diabetic foot ulcer, while a campaign to curb sugary drinks\u2014aimed at people who will not develop diabetes for another 20 years\u2014is easy to postpone, and even easier to cancel when budgets tighten. <\/p>\n

But this logic has a real cost: prevention is chronically underfunded relative to the burden it can avert, and prevention\u2014not treatment\u2014is often the first thing to be cut. <\/p>\n

This trend must be reversed, or at least protected. Treating today\u2019s patients and preventing the next generation from becoming patients are not in competition\u2014but we will not be able to do both unless prevention funding is defended as a standing commitment rather than a discretionary line item that gets cut first. <\/p>\n

Health education is the least expensive part of that commitment, and one of the most neglected. Few governments in the region invest seriously in explaining the underlying causes of diabetes and obesity in a simple, repeated way\u2014not to lecture people, but to empower them to recognise the risks they face. <\/p>\n

Schools, primary care, and national media are channels ministries already control, and can use to repeat one consistent message: that sugary drinks, ultra-processed foods, and physical inactivity are the main drivers of the disease; that risk can be screened early at low cost; and that a “prediabetes” result is a warning worth acting on, not a label to fear. <\/p>\n

A population that understands the risks it faces is a population that makes sure to get screened.<\/p>\n

Part of this lies directly in people\u2019s own hands, and it deserves to be said clearly, without the fatalism that often surrounds this disease: know your numbers, and your family\u2019s numbers. A fasting blood sugar test or an “HbA1c” test, along with measuring blood pressure and waist circumference, takes only minutes and tells you more than how you feel. <\/p>\n

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Families usually share the same meals and daily routines, so if one person\u2019s results come back high, it is useful for everyone who sits at that table to be screened too\u2014not because diabetes is inherited from fate, but because the whole family shares the same changeable habits. <\/p>\n

If you are at risk, do not get screened once and then let it go. A normal result from years ago says little about your current situation, and anyone who is overweight, has a parent or sibling with diabetes, or has already been told they are in the prediabetes stage should be retested regularly. <\/p>\n

The value of early detection lies in tracking how numbers change over time, not in a single reading that is memorised and then forgotten. <\/p>\n

Practise real moderation at the table, not just good intentions. Arabic<\/a> is rich with wisdom on this: “A full belly dulls the mind”, and previous generations used to say that a few bites are enough to keep one\u2019s back straight. <\/p>\n

This is a call to eat smaller portions, especially at generous gatherings filled with food, where people often mistake refusing more as bad manners. <\/p>\n

Bring movement back into your ordinary day. The goal does not have to be joining a gym: taking the stairs instead of the lift, walking to run short errands, or walking after a meal instead of going straight to the sofa\u2014done consistently\u2014reduces risk more than any single big effort. <\/p>\n

If you have been diagnosed, stay committed, and do not simply start treatment and then abandon it. Keep follow-up appointments, ask questions, and treat care as an ongoing relationship rather than a one-off prescription. <\/p>\n

If you ever feel that the illness is a burden on those who love you, remember that continuing to take care of yourself is one of the most meaningful things you can do for them. <\/p>\n

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Source: Al Jazeera Net website Diabetes, and the obesity that often precedes it, has become one of the world\u2019s greatest disease burdens, with incidence rising fastest in the very same places\u2014including large parts of our region\u2014that until recently considered themselves to have overcome their biggest health threats. This is not a story of individual failure….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":989437,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-989436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/one2one.health\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/one2one.health\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/one2one.health\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/one2one.health\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/one2one.health\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=989436"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/one2one.health\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":989438,"href":"https:\/\/one2one.health\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989436\/revisions\/989438"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/one2one.health\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/989437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/one2one.health\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=989436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/one2one.health\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=989436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/one2one.health\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=989436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}