Sinister Causes of the Diabetes Epidemic

Modern mass-produced food is just one cause of the diabetes epidemic. Modern mass-produced consumer goods are another.

Countless consumer goods, including the majority of items you can buy at Costco or Walmart, are manufactured with the help of chemicals known as phthalates (pronounced THal-ates). These chemicals are what make plastics plastic. They add flexibility to polyvinyl chloride, so it can be used to make stabilizers, emulsifiers, binders, lubricants, and adhesives.


Phthalates are used in every aspect of home construction. They are used to make furniture, clothes, and toys. They may even appear in the capsules for your natural herbal supplement (although companies often use plant-based gelatins that do not contain phthalates).

These ubiquitous chemicals interfere with the production of testosterone, which is important to the creation of muscle. They also interact with sites on cells known as peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) on every cell in the body. One kind of PPAR can transform a baby bone cell or a baby blood cell into a baby fat cell. Another kind of PPAR can increase the efficiency of insulin for storing sugar as triglycerides and later as fats.

Phthalates make fat cells grow. And fat cells greedily absorb more and more sugar—until the pancreas "burns out" from making it. Phthalates activate an autoimmune reaction that destroys insulin-making beta cells even while they encourage the production of fat.

The United States has banned phthalates in children's toys. The European Union has banned phthalates in sex toys. But nearly a billion pounds (450 million kilos) of phthalates are still produced every year, and tens of millions of tons of phthalates contaminate every ocean and almost every land.

Health experts and health organizations still blame diabetes on diabetics. If just a few billion dollars were spent educating the public on how their eating habits are to blame for diabetes, organizations like the NCD Health Alliance insist, tens of millions of diabetes deaths could be prevented. That is, if only ignorant people would eat like sparrows to counteract the effects of additives in their food and additives in almost every consumer product in their daily lives.

Individual effort, with appropriate medication, can keep the horrible consequences of untreated diabetes at bay. The most important single step any diabetic can take to control the disease is to know blood sugar levels. It is simply impossible to determine what helps and what hurts diabetes control if blood sugar levels are not measured every day. Diabetics who are just learning how diet, exercise, and medication work for them, and diabetics who use insulin, may need to measure their blood sugar levels with finger stick testing after each and every meal in addition to checking sugars before and after exercise, before going to bed at night, and on getting up in the morning.

Individuals and their doctors can control diabetes, but radical changes in the ways food and consumer goods manufacturers make their profits could stop diabetes. Adults might no longer buy fast food because it reminds them of mommy, and consumer goods manufacturers might have to follow the lead of toy manufacturers and find ways to make their good without plastics, but when people aren't poisoned, diabetes may return to being a rare disease.