A funny thing happened when Dr Robert Califf, the Food and Drug Administration commissioner, delivered the keynote address to the American Diabetes Association’s annual scientific session last month – he told the truth about our country’s colossal failure to treat the raging health crisis.

“For the larger epidemic of type 2 diabetes, we’re failing right now,” Califf said. “I don’t say that lightly.”

Califf did not praise his hosts, the ADA – the powerful body that sets the standard for diabetes care, while accepting tens of millions of dollars annually from the drug and medical device industry.

He also did not the laud the ADA’s funders, the drug and medical device companies that earn billions of dollars selling the insulin, pumps, needles, continuous glucose monitors and other paraphernalia Califf’s agency regulates. And he did not shrink from pointing out that, according to some accounts, diabetes has surpassed cancer as the leading economic cost to our health care system, adding up to over $400bn annually.

Instead, Califf cited America’s ruinously high consumption of sugar and the food industry’s poor labeling policies. He pointed out that affluent Americans invariably receive greater access to the latest technology than poor Americans. And he pointed out, according to an account in MedPage Today, that even the vast majority of digital tools routinely prescribed for people with diabetes fail to help people manage the disease.

“A big part of this [the solution] is going to have to be digital health tools,” he said. “We’re living in a world now where new digital health tools are coming out on a daily basis, but analyses that have been done are not showing that they’re delivering on the promises.”

Now if only Califf had connected the dots!

As I have written, a safe, effective and cheap solution to the type 2 diabetes epidemic already exists. To put it simply, type 2 diabetes, the condition of insulin resistance which afflicts 95% of people with diabetes, is reversible with a low-carb diet. The American Diabetes Association has even quietly acknowledged this. Numerous clinicians........

© The Guardian