By Dr.Wijaya Godakumbuta (Consultant Surgeon).
Diabetes can damage almost any organ in your body. It is known, for example, to cause impaired eye vision and even heart attacks, besides causing surgeons to amputate parts of your body! That is why it is considered to be a serious illness.
Type 1 diabetes is the sudden and irriversable collapse of the pancreas function. Before a person develops Type ll diabetes, he usually has a condition called ‘pre-diabetes’ in which blood glucose levels are raised but not yet high enough to be labeled as diabetes. However, some long-term damage to certain organs may already be occurring during pre-diabetes, therefore regular assessment of the older generation’s blood sugar level is important. By means of early diagnosis and effective treatment of pre-diabetes, doctors can help patients to be free of diabetes.
About 350 million people around the world have diabetes and one fifth of these live in the South -East Asia region. There had been 1.5 million deaths around the world in 2012 directly due to diabetes. It is predicted to become the seventh leading cause of death in the world by the year 2030.
The Diabetes Association of Sri Lanka (DASL) estimates that there are nearly four million diabetic people in Sri Lanka and that one third of these with diabetes are un-diagnosed. The overall level of diabetes of both kinds in the country has increased from around 16% in 2009 to 20% in 2014. In 2009 a study done by Dr. Prasad Katulanda, consultant diabetologist and his team, it had been found that urban populations have a higher incidence of diabetes (16.4%) over rural populations (8.7%); so, as it might be expected, the Western Province has the highest incidence of diabetes while the Uva Province has the lowest.
According to the scientists, although the number of people affected by diabetes is ever increasing, the country’s leaders had not taken any serious steps to raise awareness or control and reduce the risk of diabetes.
The purpose of writing this article is to show how certain parties, knowingly or unknowingly aggravate the situation in relation to ‘food habits’, and this essay can be considered as a call to the government to intervene to help the situation.
Overweight and lack of exercise are the main causes of diabetes among children, while the family habit of eating sugary and oily foods are the main causes among adults.
Sri Lankans get used to eating lots of sugar from early childhood. Actually, one can enjoy the taste of tea even without any sugar at all, and not the taste of sugar! It is a matter of just getting used to it, but the tip of a teaspoon of sugar in a cup may do little harm to a person who has already high blood sugar.
This article is a call to readers to be fully aware of the harmful effects of sugar and all carbohydrates (buns, biscuits and bread) and start to avoid them. Replace them with fibrous food such as vegetables, green and broad leaf, – it will help the body as well as the purse!
People should see all food in terms of its Glycemic Index. Food high in sugar has a high Glycemic index. White sugar is taken as the 100 mark in the Glycemic Index. It is also a measure of how hard sugar hits your pancreas, where insulin is made. If the food you eat is digested slowly, with lots of fiber, the pancreas does not have to work so hard. White bread, as carbohydrate, comes a close second, at around 93% Glycemic Index. That is why you must think in terms of vegetables, not cake, buns and biscuits!
You’ll never see stuffed roast potatoes or roast carrot and cheese, at the big shops! Let us look at all the sweet, sugary, pastry things they sell! Look at the sugar content of the foods we buy. You must agree that all the food we eat is too sweet.
But it is not simply buns, oily patties and oily samosas; everything one buys is heavily sweetened. I refer to : iced coffee, fruit drinks we get at functions (meetings), drinking yoghurt and fruit drinks we get in packets and bottles, tea and Nescafe marketed in vending machines, different varieties of cakes and sweetmeats, puddings, ice-cream, chocolate and watalappan; all have too much sugar and often, too much salt, too! It is as if manufacturers compete and outdo each other in the race to over sweeten the food. Now ‘kimbula’ buns have a sugar coating on the top as well as sugar in the bun mix inside. When I eat cake with icing, I remove the icing first! Those who first added icing sugar to cake did society a disservice.
All would agree that the above listed foods do not need to have so much sugar. Sales number would not fall if less sugar was added; set yoghurt and natural fruit juices have a low sugar content, but sales seem unaffected. By adding less sugar to those items mentioned above, the manufactures would make good savings besides removing a danger to people; people need the shops to sell food which includes safe fibrous fruit and vegetables, available to buy and eat! The DASL and the Sri Lanka Medical Association should both work and get involved in monitoring and setting safe standards for foods.
I think that the health ministry should monitor certain food items and set limits for the sugar content in them. (The DASL is a non-profit organization with its headquarters in the National Diabetics centre (NDC), 50, Sarana Mawatha, Rajagiriya. It is the only organization in Sri Lanka committed to serve the diabetic community of the country through primary and secondary prevention, education and advocacy. )
Re typed and forwarded by ROS. 10/2015