| As a tangent, I do think it's increasingly obvious that T2D (and metabolic syndrome) is a disease that's specific to the modern western diet and that lifestyle interventions are very effective at stopping or reversing T2D entirely. Here's a recent publication on a controlled study being done by Virta Health et al. Of especial interest will be Fig 3 showing just how effective carbohydrate restriction was vs "usual care": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6194375/ IDF has also recently published case studies on the effectiveness of intermittent fasting as T2D treatment for those that can't/won't carb restrict: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6194375/ To expand on the costs a bit, the ADA has similar estimates, and in their 2018 report [1] estimates $16.75K/ppy costs (also cited by the CDC [2]), with direct+indirect costs estimated at $327B/yr, and that 1/7th of every health-care dollar is spent on diabetes-related costs. The Milken Institute [3] recently published a report on American Obesity [4] that gives even bigger numbers: "chronic diseases driven by the risk factor of obesity and overweight accounted for $480.7 billion in direct health care costs in the U.S., with an additional $1.24 trillion in indirect costs due to lost economic productivity." [1] http://www.diabetes.org/advocacy/news-events/cost-of-diabete... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/diabetesatwork/plan/costs.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milken_Institute [4] https://www.milkeninstitute.org/publications/view/944 |