Diabetes has got us in a quandary. Numbers of diabetics have more than doubled over the past two decades, with an estimated 3.5 million people currently diagnosed in the UK. Ten per cent of the entire NHS budget is spent treating it – there’s been an explosion of new, expensive pharmaceutical products capable of lowering blood sugar. And the medical profession is slowly waking up to the realisation that we are a large part of the problem.
Diabetes comes in two types. Type 1 typically presents in childhood, when an aberrant immune system destroys the pancreas’s ability to make insulin. Type 1 diabetics need insulin therapy for life, and they’re a tiny minority of all diabetic patients. For the purposes of this column, forget about them.
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