COVID has been treated as a national health emergency, but what about the chronic disease epidemic?
A recent New York Times article highlights the devastating impact the COVID pandemic has had on people with diabetes, with 30-40 percent of all COVID deaths occurring among people with the disease. Diabetes impairs the immune system but also can lead to high blood pressure, obesity, and other underlying medical conditions that make COVID outcomes much worse.
While the COVID pandemic has devastated the country, we need to tackle the chronic disease epidemic with just as much urgency. Diabetes and obesity have increased steadily over the years. More than half of the US population has one chronic condition, almost a third have multiple chronic conditions. We’re approaching 1 million COVID deaths in the US over the past few years, but chronic diseases cause 1.7 million deaths a year; diabetes alone kills 87,647 people a year.
Our current medical system, which focuses almost exclusively on pharmaceutical interventions to treat sick people rather than addressing the root causes of disease, is not equipped to battle this epidemic. We need regenerative health solutions.
As we’ve reported before, for diabetes this means limiting toxic exposures. Research has shown that, while obesity is linked with diabetes, the level of our exposure to toxins also has a dramatic impact. Obese people in the bottom 10% of toxin load do not have an increased risk of diabetes; 30% of lean people with a high toxin load will develop diabetes. These findings are a true testament to the havoc these chemicals are wreaking on the human body.
