Here's a little something to mull over while sipping a Sour Power Straw moonshine cocktail: the diabetes rate has nearly doubled among adult New Yorkers over the past 20 years, and city health officials aren't shying away from calling it an epidemic.
According to data compiled by the Department of Health, 650,000 adults reported having diabetes in 2011; in 1993, 200,000 fewer adults reported having the disease. Plus, the DOH expects about 230,000 more adults have the disease, but haven't figured it out yet: "I think these statistics are very disturbing," city health commissioner Thomas Farley told NY1. "We have an epidemic of obesity that is driving an epidemic of diabetes. People with obesity are twice as likely to have diabetes."
The data notes that over 10 percent of adults in the city have diabetes now, as opposed to 4.2 percent a decade ago. And diabetes is no joke—complications from the disease include heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, blindness, weak circulation and amputation. "It's a major health crisis," state Assembly Health Committee Chairman Richard Gottfried told the Post. And putting the brakes on Mayor Bloomberg's soda ban, an initiative that may have helped cut down sugar consumption in New Yorkers' diets, probably won't help much: "I think a large part of it is a food industry that has heavily promoted processed food with large amounts of fat and sugar, and that has dramatically changed our eating habits," Gottfried said. And we're definitely doing it bigger than the rest of the country: the national diabetes rate is just 9.2 percent, proving that even Nanny Bloomberg can't save us from ourselves.
