Diabetes, diets and sweet nothings from politicians

 

Chatting recently with a relative who’s been diabetic for 15 years, I learned that there are four people on the same floor of his apartment building who’ve had their feet amputated because of the disease.

That’s an astounding statistic. Multiply that across many such apartments in many similar towns and cities, and the number you get would be, sadly, an astonishingly big number.

How is it that I don’t see that many amputees out there? The answer must be that if you’ve had one or both feet amputated, you wouldn’t go out much, with all the hassle of dealing with crutches and wheelchairs, would you?

Sadly, too, thanks to diabetes, many such amputees have a host of other health issues, which either keep them at home, possibly bed-ridden, or make outings painful or dangerous.

I’m not diabetic, though I skirt the “elevated” blood sugar levels occasionally. I try hard to eat less sugar, but I love fruit. I’m a fruit nut. Healthy as they are – vitamins, fibres etc – they’re also laden with calories, and that’s bad news.

Luckily, I’m not into the “bad” foods such as cakes and pastries. These foods have high glycaemic indices, which means: stay clear if you don’t want diabetes.

Giving up sweet stuff isn’t easy. Try ordering kopi o kurang manis. The cafe either doesn’t understand what that means, or is insulted by it and doubles down on the sugar, or gives you the worst deal, where kurang manis also means kurang kopi.

Setting a new record

How bad is the diabetes problem in Malaysia?

Well, we have Malaysia Boleh’d ourselves into the record books. Apparently, we have the highest rate of diabetes in the Western Pacific region. Eat your heart out, Singapore! This honour is all ours.

Honours aside, diabetes hits around one in five Malaysians. The worst affected are the Indians, followed by the Malays, and then the Chinese. The “dll” – dan lain lain – come last here, as they so often do, though they probably won’t be complaining much about this particular situation.

Globally, the Chinese and the Indians have the highest rates of diabetes. It’s not often the Chinese and the Indians share anything in common, but diabetes unites them. Unsurprisingly their diaspora here are also carrying on the ancestral country’s tradition (and genes).

What about the Malays? We, being mainland South East Asians living right smack between the Chinese and Indian sub-continents, are also blessed, or perhaps cursed, with it.

Why the political silence?

I certainly don’t wish to poke fun at diabetes sufferers. But I always wondered how come this horrible medical problem isn’t higher in our consciousness? How come the sound and the fury of our politics does not focus on this but instead on other seemingly insignificant things?

Every time I hear yet another politician saying he or she is fighting for his or her race, I wonder – what are you doing about helping your people suffering and dying from ill health?

And what are you doing about the many other often interrelated issues facing them – poor education, low income, drug addictions etc?

I should dip these politicians in a vat of molten sugar and dump them on an anthill. They’ll give the ants diabetes for sure, but it’ll be worth it. Perhaps they’ll turn up in Parliament the next day and do something useful. The politicians, I mean, not the ants.

Health? No sweat!

Apart from diet, we also suffer from excessive love of the sedentary life. We’re not a nation that hustles itself to raise a sweat. Being in such a humid and hot country, we give ourselves plenty of excuses to insulate ourselves from nature.

While our ancestors, or even just our parents, worked the fields, or the seas or rivers, for their livelihood, we’ve left all these behind in favour of comfort and safety. Even when we want to sweat it out, we do it in fancy gyms dressed in the latest fashions and sporting the latest gadgets,

Scandinavia is well known for health and fitness, an amazing fact given that for half of the year the region is a frozen winterscape. The Vikings have been outdoorsy for centuries of course (check out Netflix), but this current focus on health is relatively recent and goes back only a few generations.

Can we build that same culture here? Certainly we can. If we really want to, we can easily crush diabetes through better diets and healthier living. With some government support such as incentives and sanctions (sugar tax for example), we can achieve that within a generation or two.

Smoking – so yesterday

Look at smoking: it used to be very widespread among adults but the habit has gone down tremendously over the past few decades, such that cigarette companies are left desperately trying to persuade young people to smoke as they’ve pretty much lost their older customers.

They’re not making much headway, if you look at smoking statistics, especially among the more prosperous, health-conscious nations. Smoking is so yesterday.

Nobody gains from diabetes. Private hospitals don’t like to deal with chronic diabetes cases because the patients are generally poor, even if they’ll happily deal with any acute illness caused by it – heart diseases, strokes for example – which are much more lucrative.

The burden of caring for them, given that most of the sufferers are the poorer members of our society, is picked up by our public health system. However that puts them under a lot of strain and diverts much resources away from other more critical needs.

This is such a shame because it’s something so preventable.

What’s on your plate?

Every time I enter a restaurant and put a little amount of rice on my plate (sometimes I don’t take any at all), I’d also see a literal mound if not a hill of rice on everybody else’s plates.

It doesn’t look like everybody who does this is a Bangladeshi labourer who needs the calories either.

The need for calories among manual workers aside, it’s also a proven fact that the poorer you are, the unhealthier your diet is. Mounds of plain white rice with a piece of fried chicken is about as unhealthy as it can get. In today’s high cost of living world, you see that a lot unfortunately.

You are more likely to be obese, too. The World Obesity Federation (yes, there is such a thing) recently estimated that by 2035 half the world would be obese if no action is taken now.

Given that many richer countries will be in a better shape, those in poorer countries will be far worse than just being 50% obese.

Attention, please

These are the really critical issues affecting our society. But it doesn’t get the focus and attention it deserves. Our elected leaders don’t address these at all because it doesn’t get them votes.

The other reason is that some of them are so dumb or uncaring they can’t even get the idea in their head that this will seriously affect the lives of millions. All that talk about rights and privileges and heaven and hell improves nobody’s lives except their own.

Whilst we think about the afterlife, we shouldn’t accept unnecessary suffering in the current one, either. Many of our leaders are unfortunately hobbled by their indifference to anything that doesn’t get them votes.

Dump them on anthills I say, and let the ants have diabetes instead. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT