'Comfortable' Lifestyles Lead To Diabetes

Filed in archive Lifestyle on July 28, 2006

We often associate illness and disease with poverty and poor medical care. But when diabetes is concerned, it's often a life of opportunity and indulgence that is part of the problem.

This interesting article explores this phenomenon in Uganda: as families there continued to improve their finances and lifestyles, creating more options such as more eating choices, diabetes rates have risen sharply.

A lifestyle characterized by inactivity, comfort and overeating among Uganda's urban school- going youth from wealthy families has made them and their parents prone to diabetes, the state-owned daily New Vision reported on Saturday.

The report said that at the fourth scientific conference of the Uganda Diabetes Association (UDA) on Friday, Ugandan Prime Minister Apolo Nsibambi regretted the UDA finding, saying it cast a gloomy picture on Uganda's health image.

Nsibambi said about one million Ugandans were suffering from diabetes mellitus. It constituted a striking contrast to the figure in 1972 when only 254 African diabetic subjects were registered in Mulago Hospital diabetic clinic.

Can we blame the choices offered by a 'comfortable' lifestyle, or are we entirely responsible for our health?