I've been diagnosed 3 years now and also think that, despite the fact that I'm more attentive to anything that mentions diabetes, there is much more in the media generally these days. The majority seems to be devoted to blaming people with diabetes for how much they are costing the health service, blaming them for not living faultless lives and getting into this pickle in the first place, or promising some wonder cure at the first whiff of an indication that some mouse somewhere survived a bizarre and hideous experiment that they would never attempt to repeat on a human.
Obviously, if everyone behaved and ate healthily and ran 5 miles a day then there would be fewer people with a whole range of diseases and I would absolutely love that to be the case. But the facts of life are that it takes an awfully long time for people as a whole to change the habits of a lifetime and stop passing on those bad habits to their children and grandchildren. All the time, of course, manufacturers and stores are changing the goalposts, and what could once be relied upon as healthy now is packed with sugar or some chemically altered fat, or 'reconstituted' from bleached and blasted chicken carcasses. Meanwhile, the 'good' stuff you can buy comes at a big price premium because it plays on people's fears and expectations that they need to pay more to get better, unadulterated stuff.
I don't think these campaigns really work - look at the anti-smoking campaigns. All the talk of how much harm they can do hasn't really dissuaded that many people from doing it, even the price hikes and putting 'smoking kills' on every packet doesn't make many smokers stop. The ban on smoking in public places has probably done more than any other measure to cut people's consumption of cigarettes. Problem is though that you can't apply that to food.
What we really need is a Jamie Oliver-style approach. Teach children to cook - make food and nutrition hugely important in the curriculum from a young age. Teach them to grow vegetables and herbs. Teach them how the human body works - how complex it all is, and how one part often depends on another. I was never taught in biology or chemistry how the cardiovascular system worked, or the endocrine system, we just learned about individual, isolated elements.
Most people think it won't happen to them until it happens to them. As for diabetes, as we know (but Joe Public doesn't and is rarely told) you can't always avoid getting it no matter how hard you try.
Oh dear, I went off on one! 😉
