Traveling with Sugar

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Amy Moran-Thomas. Traveling with Sugar

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Traveling with Sugar

Chronicles of a Global Epidemic

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Many of the individuals I met in Belize came to number among the millions of worldwide deaths now attributed to diabetes each year.44 Somehow, the slow-moving quality of chronic conditions like diabetes—what U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon once called a “public health emergency in slow motion”—seems to make it only more daunting to imagine reversing its spread in the future.45 A range of disturbing statistics suggests that today’s policy approaches have not slowed the rise of global diabetes rates or mortality; to the contrary, these figures appear to have accelerated worldwide each year they have been tracked. According to the latest projections of the International Diabetes Federation, the condition “affects over 425 million people, with this number expected to rise to over 600 million within a generation.”46 No health institution that I am aware of predicts that current interventions might be able to curb the problem on a population level. In this light, there is global resonance to what was probably the single thing I heard repeated most often by the Belizean and Garifuna individuals with diabetes who contributed to this project: “It is my children I’m worried about.”

Every story in the rest of this book is really the same story that Mr. P taught me to see—chronic strains that slowly cause bodies to fall apart and the people trying to keep each other together. In fact, each chapter retells that same story again, from a different angle. When it comes to diabetes, this repetition is no narrative accident. Fatigue and relentless repetition are the defining features of what makes diabetic sugar harrowing—people trying to stave off bodily loss and failing organs day in and day out, year in and year out, over and over again, utterly foreseeable, likely coming anyway.

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