Sweet Talk: A Layman’s History of Diabetes
If you don’t have “diabetes,” someone close to you does. That’s “diabetes” in quotation marks because that’s what we call it, but the disease is part of a much bigger problem: metabolic failure.
As of 2015 (the most recent year for data), 30.3 million Americans had diabetes—9.4 percent of the U.S. population—according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Another 84.1 million were prediabetic, meaning that untreated they would likely have diabetes within five years. According to the American Diabetes Association, the total economic cost of diabetes in the U.S. increased from $205 billion in 2007 to $327 billion in