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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 Dr. Alan Moses was the former chief medical officer of Harvard's Joslin Diabetes Center and is now associate vice president of medical affairs at pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, which sponsored the conference.
"We tend to think of the costs associated with diabetes and worry that putting appropriate resources into diabetes is going to cost more," he said. "But diabetes is one of the few conditions where when you improve health, you actually reduce the cost burden on society. It should be viewed as an investment with a real return."
Certain steps taken by governments in the developed world are already helping. For example, Sen. Guy Barnett of Australia, himself a type 1 diabetic, said his government is moving to change what he labeled an "obesinogenic" environment Down Under.
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Along with the United States, "we are one of the fattest countries on Earth," Barnett told reporters at a press conference held Wednesday. "But for governments everywhere, (diabetes) is a monster that is getting bigger and bigger."
With one in 10 Australian children now obese, the Australian government has mandated healthy school lunches, boosted funding for after-school physical activity programs and negotiated with fast-food giant McDonald's to make menus healthier. Former U.S. President Clinton helped broker similar deals with food companies last year to keep unhealthy sodas and snacks out of American schools.
Those and other initiatives can and should be tested in countries worldwide, Silink said. In one sense, he said, developing countries have a real edge on the West, since "they are still in the process of developing their new towns, their urban centers.
"So, in terms of town planning, societal engineering, they have a chance to engineer it for health and not for conditions that are detrimental to human health," Silink said. "It's up to the diabetes world to work with the various organizations to make this happen."
More information
Find out more about diabetes at the American Diabetes Association.
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