Diabetes Belt Tightens

Posted on October 14th



America is famous for being ‘fat and proud’, but a recently released diabetes infographic shows the terrifying scale of the problem.

Scale is an appropriate word, and it is certainly tipping towards catastrophe – in Delaware alone the already sky high rate of obesity rocketed up last year from 28% to 34%.

Indeed there is a whole “diabetes belt” in America made up of southern states and central states such as Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Kentucky.

These states are famous for their home cooked southern fried food, but as their greatest culinary legacy is Kentucky Fried Chicken, this is not always a good thing. Fat food has been proven to have a detrimental effect on health, to such an extent that countries such as Denmark have recently released a ‘fat tax’.



A staggering 12% of people in these US states, which include Louisiana, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas and West Virginia, have diabetes. That is considerably higher than the national average of 8.5%.

These are the findings from a survey which measured the body mass index of hundreds of thousands of Americans who were aged 18 and over. That is a scary thought in itself, given the fact that there are also so many teenagers in America who now need bariatric surgery.

And there is a definite link between the findings – the states which had the highest levels of obesity also had the highest diabetes rates.




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