Mayor Adams has something in common with a journalist named Neil Barsky — and it isn’t just that they’ve both had bylines in the Daily News (Adams as a politician in recent years, Barsky as a business reporter in the mid-1980s). Barsky, who later did quite well on Wall Street before founding the criminal justice reform-focused Marshall Project, was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes — then reversed the diagnosis mainly by changing his diet.
It’s a story shockingly similar to the one Adams tells: He woke up one morning and “couldn’t see the numbers on my alarm clock. I went to the doctor, who diagnosed me with Type 2 diabetes.” The physician said medication was the only responsible option, lest Adams be consigned to a future of lost vision and lost limbs. Adams instead embraced an aggressive diet change. Out went meat and dairy and processed foods, in came vegetables and whole grains. No more obesity, no more diabetes.
The revelation is essential to improving lives in a country where Type 2 diabetes is now responsible for more than 100,000 deaths a year, disproportionately people of color, and leads to more than 100,000 annual limb amputations. The disease and associated complications cost our health care system more than $400 billion a year.
This is not to say that saying goodbye to sugary soda and high-fat, cholesterol-rich foods is a magical answer for everyone who’s ever diagnosed with the condition. It’s not; Adams admits that “it may not be possible for everyone to reverse a diabetes diagnosis with a lifestyle change or even with medication.” It’s essential for anyone struggling to get their doctor’s candid opinion. Still, lifestyle changes could well prove more effective than many people have been led to believe.
After Barsky’s experience, he asked why the reflexive response to so many Type 2 diabetes cases in America has been for MDs to reach for the prescription pad — and that led him to a broader systemic critique. The American Diabetes Association, Barsky has written in probing investigative pieces for The Guardian, was nudging people to take medication and consume sugar substitutes, when for many, taking a turn into an alternate diet may well yield better health outcomes.
This spring, the plot thickened when Elizabeth Hanna, formerly an ADA nutritionist, filed a lawsuit alleging she was fired for not endorsing Splenda-filled recipes that she said were “in violation of its own guidelines and standards of care and nutrition” — recipes she said the organization was promoting primarily because the company that makes the sugar substitute was among big-money contributors to the ADA, along with pharma companies, insurance providers and others.
She claims that the nation’s biggest diabetes organization has had its priorities bent by some of its funders, resulting in too little attention paid to diet and lifestyle changes and too much emphasis on medicalizing the problem.
Enter the American Diabetes Society, a new organization that pledges “independence” from the corporate and pharma-dominated establishment, seeking “a world where type 2 diabetes can be prevented & reversed through informed dietary choices, innovative research, and comprehensive education.”
Good luck, so that more Eric Adamses and Neil Barskys can also take control over their health. A future of less medical spending, fewer amputations and fewer premature deaths is possible.
