Had the most interesting and insightful conversation in the Uber on the way to South Beach. 60-year old lady driver, very pleasant. When she found out I’m in healthcare, she immediately started telling me about her longstanding type 2 diabetes.
First thing she said was: “I don’t want to be on medications, and I feel like every single drug causes another problem!”
I thought to myself: RIGHT ON!
She then proceeded to tell me all about her efforts over the years, and to be fair she was doing better than most, lost a lot of weight, but was still clearly lacking in good knowledge about how she should be eating as a type two diabetic.
She appeared to not be eating a huge amount of carbs/sugars during the day, so I was a bit confused as to why she was still struggling with lots of complications, including vascular disease and neuropathy. So I asked her what she drinks, and she said that she tries to drink water, but also regularly drinks “My energy drink right there”. I asked her to tell me how much sugar it contains, and she handed it to me.
I had to look twice at the label. Listen to this:
70 GRAMS OF SUGAR A BOTTLE!!
This is absolutely awful for somebody who has diabetes (aka basically extreme carbohydrate/sugar intolerance). She didn’t seem to realize how bad this was.
So this is my line of thinking, these types of drinks contain an unthinkable amount of sugar. A couple of generations ago you couldn’t purchase toxic junk like this.
One could say, she is an adult, and should know better. But realistically, not everyone is highly understanding of the dangers of sugars or how to manage/reverse diabetes, especially with a completely useless profit-driven medical establishment.
So my thought is: should drinks like this be more regulated, or at least come with a bright red HEALTH WARNING on them? Or should we just let things be under the guise of “it’s a free market country”. You know what I think, what do you think?
I hope RFK Jr and our nation’s health leaders can seriously look into this