February 28, 2009
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the new El Paso Diabetes Association office on Thursday (Feb. 26, 2009), Mayor John Cook said he would make a priority to attract the pharmaceutical industry to El Paso to encourage research to find a cure for diabetes.
This statement is a perfect example of the area’s ignorance behind this debilitating and life-shortening disease. More than 85,000 El Pasoans suffer from diabetes and another 25 percent of El Pasoans are undiagnosed and unaware that they have it.
Type 2 Diabetes (the type of which 90 percent of diabetic El Pasoans have) already has a cure. We don’t need more research, healthcare, or pharamaceuticals. Matter of fact, we need to listen to what the existing research is already telling us — prevent diabetes in the first place. Proper diet can inhibit people from getting diabetes and reduce healthcare costs and death.
The American Diabetes Association reports that one out of every five healthcare dollars is spent on caring for someone with diagnosed diabetes. With kidney dialysis centers already next door to fast food restaurants, what is El Paso thinking?
Fifty percent of all patients at local hospitals are admitted because of diabetes-related complications. Yet, as taxpayers, we criticize having to pay for the healthcare costs associated to wounded Mexicans victimized from North America’s drug war?
How ironic that we ignore the immense financial consequences behind our personal bad health and poor diet. (These precise healthcare costs to the State of Texas project to reach, in 2040, a level so high that the healthcare system will go bankrupt, according to Texas Comptroller Susan Combs.)
With 22 percent of children in El Pasoan middle schools showing signs of insulin-resistance and diagnosed with pre-diabetes, we need to end our apathy. More area residents are dying from what they eat then from guns in Mexico, so why no fuss over deadly diets and menus?
The food choices available in this community are direct indicators of the area’s health problems and additionally indicative of the health care costs. Our schools feed our children refined sugar, over-processed starch, and hydrogenated fat. We fill our grocery carts with the same junk. And then, we take the family out for equally junky restaurant food where the kids can “play.”
However, though El Paso (and the state of Texas as a whole) is amidst an epidemic, there is an honest and easy solution. The solution is food. We need to promote good, healthy, natural, local, sustainable food for everyone. El Paso needs community food security.
On Friday (Feb. 27), 2009 at the New Mexico Organic Farming Conference in Las Cruces, N.M., Dr. Mily Gonzalez, New Mexico State Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, stressed that good food is the solution and hope for eradicating health problems such as Type 2 diabetes.
To accomplish this, we need a collective response from both governmental officials and citizens. First off, we need our leaders to take policy action against the food that is harming us. We need measures such as—junk food and soda bans in the schools, city-wide fast food joint limitations, and conditions controlling junk food marketing. Also, we need to get access to good food in schools and neighborhoods through education and outreach as well as appropriate urban planning and economic development. We need to promote and sponsor fresh produce farmers’ markets, community supported (urban) agriculture, and community food programs.
Furthermore as citizens, we need to provide ourselves with good food. We need to grow urban gardens. In 1943, the Victory Garden Movement spurted when First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt called on Americans to join in the war effort and plant home gardens. By the end of WWII, 40 percent of American’s produce was supplied by their 20 million home gardens.
We are at war once again. Three out of four deaths in Texas are from chronic disease such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, asthma, arthritis, and diabetes (all correlated to diet), according to Texas
Comptroller Susan Combs’s 2008 report, “Texas in Focus: A Statewide View of Opportunities.” We have two choices—face up to reality or remain living a shorter life and suffering death.
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Johanna Wallner is a political economist working in the nonprofit sector in South Central El Paso.