Why are people getting type 2 diabetes at a younger age?
People are getting type 2 diabetes at younger ages because we are basically seeing an epidemic of obesity and inactivity in children. So if you think about it, when you see the classic guy in my clinic who is 45, 50 years old - he's got a central ponch. He has got a family history of type 2 and he comes to see me because he has diabetes. He'll tell me very proudly that he played something in college. That he was thinner than his wife when he got married, that he was fit and he is proud of that. And he will say, "I don't know what happened." But we know what happened, you know the kids, house, the mortgage. But we know that he was fit in high school and college. The problem is, is that his son is a couch potato. His son isn't going out and doing anything more than walking to school even if that. His son is spending hours and hours of time doing things that aren't physically active. So we are shifting. So instead of being 50 and becoming fat, people are becoming 10 and becoming fat and that means that this disease is now starting when they are ten, not fifty, which means this epidemic is going to be seen in fifteen year olds, twenty year olds, thirty year olds. And they're going to get heart disease. They are going to get strokes and they are going to get diabetes before they are forty.
