Q. In your latest book, The Blood Sugar Solution, and also when you are speaking to groups throughout the country, you advocate using community support to combat the diseases of obesity and diabetes, stating that it actually works better than medication. You have even made the statement that, if we want to get healthy, rather than going to a doctor we might want to go to a church instead. Could you please explain?
A. There is more data coming in daily that indicates that the power of a supportive community is far greater than any physician, clinic or hospital. The missing ingredient we’ve been looking for in a cure for diabesity is not another medication, but the community. The community is the medicine! People need someone else to accompany them on their journey to good health. They need the support, the camaraderie, the empathy and the encouragement only others can provide. The solution to this current epidemic will never come from governments, health care institutions or corporations. Big Pharma is never going to come out with a miracle drug that will cure everyone. But what has been proven to work over and over again, in different settings—workplaces, community centers, faith-based centers and schools—is building a community-based support system that serves to guide people toward sustainable behavior and lifestyle change.
This realization is starting to spread in the health care community. Doctors frustrated with the failure of medication to treat their patients with chronic illness, obesity and diabetes are starting small groups with eight to 30 patients and are meeting weekly to teach them about nutrition, cooking, shopping, exercise, stress management and more.
In The Blood Sugar Solution I write about the work done with Pastor Rick Warren and his congregation at Saddleback Church in California. In January 2011, we introduced a healthy lifestyle curriculum to members of Rick’s church. Though we were hoping a few hundred would sign up, our hopes were greatly exceeded. In the first month, 15,000 church members signed up to participate in taking back their health, and in the year that followed they lost a combined quarter million pounds. They also lost the need for many medications, the need to be hospitalized and the need to go to the doctor as often. What they gained was more energy, better sleep, better blood pressure, better mood, better skin and a better sex drive. And they did so, not by using some marvelous new drug but by learning and implementing the simple steps of self-care and then helping their neighbor do the same. The power of positive peer pressure works. It always has.
Acute disease can be left in the hospital, but creating health and healing of chronic disease seems to happen best in the community with people helping people where each one of us lives—where we eat, cook, learn, work, play and pray.
Q. You have given the current health epidemic a new name. You call it diabesity. Could you please explain what diabesity is?
A. Diabesity is the underlying cause that drives most chronic illnesses. Caused by insulin resistance, which is also the real biological cause of obesity, diabesity is a condition of metabolic imbalance and disease that ranges from a mild blood sugar imbalance to diabetes. One in two Americans will be affected by diabesity by 2020, and, sadly, 90 percent of them will not be diagnosed. While currently there are no national screening recommendations, no treatment guidelines and no approved medications, diabesity is impacting more than 100 million Americans and causing a huge economic burden, costing us over $2 trillion a year in health care costs. Diabesity is the leading cause of chronic illness, including heart disease, stroke, dementia and cancer. By 2020, it is estimated that there will be fewer than 20 million deaths worldwide from infectious disease but more than 50 million will die from these chronic but preventable diabesity-generated diseases. Because of this, we are now raising the first generation of Americans that will be sicker and die younger than their parents.