Diabetes: Part Two.

I want to thank all of you who left comments on my last post. The facts are frightening and cannot be any clearer: Our quality of life is directly related to the food we ingest, the stress we face, and the amount of exercise we engage in.

Some genetics is involved as well; but we are still in charge of what we do everyday. My ancestors lived simpler lives, some past their eighties and with all their faculties intact, but they had opposite problems: lack of food, too much physical exercise, no chance of relief in their work situation. Those good old days were not so good.

Now we have an abundance of food, availability of work with little or no physical stress, and opportunities for recreation and pharmaceuticals that cure many diseases that used to kill us in childhood.

With all this, we make strange choices. We are smart and well read, and can definitely beat the odds if we realized the consequences of our choices. Remember when we all began to do self breast analysis? That small change, understanding that we are in charge of our own health, has saved us possible problems. If I feel anything unusual, I'm telling.

Medical education is not part of school curricula. We offer a semester or two of general health information squeezed with the physical education curriculum. We can't afford to offer anatomy, physiology and other medical primers.

I am part of the local school board that creates policies and curriculum offerings. We have begun to cut programs to manage our budget. We are not expending moneys we don't have. Yet, more than ever before, we need broad-based and iron-clad policies for all disease control , policies that should be funded at state and national levels, and that reach down and are part of the curriculum at all grade levels.

And for you men reading this, diabetes causes many physiological changes, among which is e.d. We don't need pills to fight the effect of diseases. We need education and pharmaceuticals to fight the occurrence in the first place.