Diabetes costs the United States $218 Billion annually according to a new study released today. The astronomical, bailout scale, figure includes medical care costs, insulin, amputations, hospitalization, and indirect costs like lost productivity, disability payments and early retirement. The costs to the American economy amount to an astounding 10% of all health care costs in the country.

What makes these already frightening numbers even scarier is that the total number of people suffering from diabetes in the United States has nearly doubled in the past decade, from 5 in 1000 ten years ago to 9 in 1000 today, and continues to grow. Plus diabetes disproportionately affects the least fortunate in our society, where access to healthy foods in poorer ares much more difficult to come by and harmful fast food joints are ubiquitous. Tragically these businesses who trumpet their low prices necessitate a much greater cost to the health of the nation in the long run.

Read the rest of this entry »

The TakePart Top 10 Weekly Roundup is a compilation of the week’s most notable stories from our entertainment-meets-social-action blogging network. Check out some of our most popular stories of the week, as well as a few TakePart blogger favorites!

TakePart Gang:

Before He Was Indicted, Ted Stevens Was “Tubed” by Blair Golson

Strawberry Fields Forever by Wendy Cohen

* * *

Nicole Hughes:

Green Video of the Week: Crazy Alien Plants

Fat Princess Video Game: The Joke’s Not Really That Funny

* * *

Andy Kondrat:

Alaska’s Northwest Passage to Open For Second Straight Year

Stephen Colbert Interview’s Brendan Koerner, Slate’s Green Lantern

* * *

Jon Popham:

L.A. Bans New Fast Food Joints

Flint Michigan Seeks Sponsors…For Police Surveillance Cameras

* * *

Gina Telaroli:

Veganism in Ohio: Update #2, Photo Diary

An Apology for Slavery and Jim Crow? We Shall See…

The Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted today to put a ban on new fast food restaurants in South Los Angeles. City Officials are hoping the ban will help slow the rapidly growing obesity rate in this impoverished area of the city. Thirty percent of South L.A. adults are obese compared with 19.1 percent of adults in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area and 14.1 percent on the more affluent west side of town. This comes as little surprise when you consider that 73 percent of all restaurants in South L.A. are fast food compared with 42 percent in West Los Angeles. The moratorium will last for one year and is intended to attract other types of restaurants to an area desperately in need of healthier choices. The bill requires the signature of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to become law. The California Restaurant Association is considering a legal challenge to the city ordinance.

Read the rest of this entry »

FATWORLD is a video game using cute characters and bright colors to teach players the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S.

As explained on FATWORLD.org: The game’s goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition and factors like budgets, the physical world, subsidies, and regulations. Existing approaches to nutrition advocacy fail to communicate the aggregate effect of everyday health practices. It’s one thing to explain that daily exercise and nutrition are important, but people, young and old, have a very hard time wrapping their heads around outcomes five, 10, 50 years away. You can choose starting weights and health conditions, including predispositions towards ailments like diabetes, heart disease, or food allergies. You’ll have to construct menus and recipes, decide what to eat and what to avoid, exercise (or not), and run a restaurant business to serve the members of your community.

Read the rest of this entry »

Not to be outdone by Aqua Colbert, Bill Maher’s got his own hot concept for the bottled beverage business. From last Friday’s “New Rules”:

“As far as I’m concerned, Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper still doesn’t have enough shit going on. I need Caffeine-Free Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper”no, no, no, I need Cool Ranch Extreme Caffeine-Free Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper. And baked. And, I want a sticker on it telling kids that drugs are bad.”

Maher’s mockery of marketing run amok raises a sticky issue: the fact that excess soda consumption’s doing more harm to our kids than drugs are, objectively speaking. And soda–even diet soda–is taking a toll on grown-ups, too.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, politicians and dirt, that delightful duo. I’m talking horticulture, not whores. Forget about the soiled legacy of Eliot Spitzer; consider, rather, the contrasting agricultural approaches of Prince Charles and President Bush.

Prince Charles has been an organic farmer for decades; his Highgrove Estate farm provides some of the ingredients for Duchy Originals, the line of food products he founded in 1992. On Duchy’s 10th anniversary, Charles explained why he’d decided to get into the sustainable snack trade:

“I wanted to demonstrate that it was possible to produce food of the highest quality, working in harmony with the environment and nature, using the best ingredients and adding value through expert production. I also wanted to engender increasing funds for my Charitable Foundation, which receives all the profits through which I can then support an increasing number of worthwhile projects.”

President Bush’s 1600-acre Crawford ranch, bought in 1999, produces bumper crops of something called “brush,”  which has no known culinary use in any culture’s cuisine. Bush has reportedly said that “the property is only good for grazing, and it’s pretty thin at that.”

Read the rest of this entry »

East Harlem and East LA may be a continent apart, but they have one geographic trait in common: they’re both “food deserts,” i.e., neighborhoods where it’s often easier to buy drugs and guns than greens or oranges. Not coincidentally, residents of both places also suffer disproportionately high rates of diabetes and obesity, as do inner city communities all across the nation.

Our warped agricultural policies have created a two-tier food chain in which fresh, healthy produce has become a luxury for affluent consumers while low-income families fill their pantries and fridges with nutritionally bankrupt commodity crop-based processed crap subsidized by our tax dollars. We’re gonna get stuck with the tab for an awful lot of insulin shots, too, if we don’t start giving folks an alternative to this diabetes-inducing diet.

Everyone from community gardeners to policy makers is scrambling to bring more fruits and vegetables into underserved urban communities. But that’s only half the battle. Raw food may be all the rage from Santa Monica to Soho, but most of us still prefer to sit down to a nice, hot meal, even if we can’t figure out how to prepare it ourselves. People who’ve come to rely entirely on convenience foods and take-out don’t know what to make of”or make with”fresh fruits and vegetables.

But what if somebody handed them a nifty little cookbook chock full of easy-to-make recipes for wholesome comfort foods? I mean, just gave it away, for nothing?

Read the rest of this entry »