Diabetes prevalent
BAGUIO CITY, Philippines – Cases of childhood diabetes are on the rise, with most of them involving obese and overweight children.
According to Dr. Francis Pizarro of the Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center (BGHMC), diabetes is now considered as a modern-day epidemic because of the surge in the number of diabetic children.
Pizarro stressed that diabetes is highly treatable and its complications are preventable. Parents and teachers just need to be wary about the condition of the children.
He said that when the BGHMC Diabetes Center opened in 1998, it treated only about 100 patients a year. In 2002, it breached the 1,000 a year barrier and today, they are encountering at the center about 8,000 diabetics a year which is now causing an alarm among health workers on how to control the unpredictable increase in the number of diabetes cases being recorded annually.
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This is a country that has traditionally been highly rice dependent. Now that the diet has improved with other vegetables, meats, fish & fruits; the continued intake of the same amount of rice just contributes to the onset of adult-onset diabetes. When the same amount of rice is ingested as before the diet improves, the starch in rice turns to sugar and is excess. Any dietician will tell you this so there are 2 possible solutions. The first is to simply reduce the rice intake and the second, more sensible one, would be to switch to brown rice which has more nutrients and SHOULD be less costly because it has one less milling step. Then a reduction in intake would also be beneficial.
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