The Poisoned Diet: How American Schools Have Primed Students for Type Two Diabetes
I grew up in a home with a parent who has type one diabetes, so I was educated early on about the dangers of contracting type two diabetes. I listened to my parents lecture about the reality of eating a consistent diet of junk food and how it would turn your body into a ticking time-bomb, primed for contracting type two diabetes.
In studies done by the CDC, 1.5 million people 18 and older were diagnosed with type two diabetes in 2018. In 2014 and 2015, nearly 6,000 children were diagnosed with type two each year. Over 34.4 million people currently have diabetes in the US, and 1 in 5 people don’t even know that they have it.
When I first began health classes in the fourth grade, I was surprised that with all of the talk about healthy eating, none of the teachers wanted to talk about eating poorly. The only focus was on being overweight and the risk of contracting cancer. I felt angry that my school thought that it was okay to leave out learning about diabetes and how it could affect anyone.
Diabetes comes in two types; type one is when your body cannot produce insulin, a necessary hormone that helps glucose to enter the blood cells. Type two is when your body either cannot use or make insulin well.
Schools may tell children to eat “right” or they will gain weight, but they do not commonly explain the possible effects that can manifest later in life. America already has a problem with obesity and eating poorly, and so many people have heightened their chances of contracting type two diabetes. As a nation, obesity is on the rise due to unhealthy eating and poor exercise habits. Schools continuously tell students to eat healthily and take care of their bodies, but their health education programs lack specific details about why this is so important.
Children are commonly educated on cancer and the effects of smoking but not on diabetes, specifically type two. In public school education, there are no stated guidelines to teach students about diabetes or obesity. The CDC has set up guidelines for public school health classes, but there is no reinforced standard for actually teaching these standards. Health curriculums are vague and only cover the bare necessities. Even the CDC guidelines are unclear, offering no real backbone for a decent health curriculum to be formed.
Schools ply children with processed foods and expect them to listen to the healthy eating speech. This action leads children on a direct path to unhealthy eating habits furthering their chances of contracting type two diabetes.
After reviewing the health curriculum of a local Connecticut school district (Berlin Public Schools), I found that they only cover the dangers of smoking, drinking, and drugs. While these are all important topics to cover, the lack of education on a disease directly related to the obesity epidemic that grips this country is appalling. According to the CDC, 20.6% of 12–19-year-olds in the US are obese. Obesity is said to be one of the leading causes of type two diabetes.
With a rise in adolescent obesity, schools should be more proactive in educating students about the dangers of an unhealthy diet. Every day we see ads for fast food and processed foods, specifically structured to attract and entice. These ads focus on the unhealthiest foods to eat, but they appear so enticing that it would make sense to say, “Oh, it won’t hurt to have one burger.” But that one burger turns into a mountain of junk, and your basic school education never taught you that all of this junk would cause you to become sick. With obesity on the rise in the US, schools need to take action to teach students about the real dangers of poor eating habits, that if they don’t treat their bodies right then later on in life, they could develop a disease that will force them to change so that they don’t die.
Schools need to take responsibility and teach children about the dangers of the over-saturated American diet. They need to be responsible for the lack of education has helped to extradite the epidemic of obesity. Schools should also help to educate parents on the effects of poor eating habits so that they can help to stop the spread of obesity and keeping their children from dying young.
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