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Diabetes Rates Have Been Falling For Over A Decade
The complexity of chronic disease
If you look at the current pseudoscientific movement that has taken over the United States, you’ll notice a few oddities. They tend to really like ivermectin, which is a very useful drug when used for certain parasitic diseases, but also not a miracle cure of all ill health. There’s also a strong theme in all of the MAHA writing that Americans are less healthy than other countries, and doing much worse than they used to. This is generally attributed to a variety of food additives — that dreaded Red Dye 3 — but also to the fact that the US has been getting fatter for some time.
The thing is, if you look at the data closely, it doesn’t really support this belief. Type 2 diabetes is a great example*. The disease is directly caused by obesity, and you can largely reverse the symptoms by losing a lot of weight.
The number of people with diabetes has also been skyrocketing in the US for a long time. The CDC estimated in 1980 that 5.8 million US residents had diabetes. The most recent 2021 estimates suggest that this has increased to a whopping 38.4 million, with most of these cases being made up of Type 2 diabetes.
So why do I say that diabetes rates are falling? Well, it has to do with the ambiguity of the term “rates”, and also…
