Nauru. Heard of it? It’s a tiny island in the south Pacific, 21 square kilometres, picturesque from the air, populated by roughly 12,000 fatties. 75 per cent of the population is obese, and 90 per cent unemployed.
On Nauru, the people lie about by day, lazily dropping pastries and pies into their salivating mouths. By night, they roll about, clutching their flatulent guts, and vowing that things will change.
Money laundering aside, Nauru isn’t famous for much, but it is top of the pops in one regard: Nauru leads the world in the diabetes stakes. Nearly half of the population has type two diabetes. Half.
And type two is the bad one, the one you get for not being able to take your fingers out of the cookie jar. Type two diabetes is the scourge of the indulgent and overweight.
Second on the global type two diabetes chart? It’s not America, famously the land of the supersized meal and the steatopygous populace. Look around you. Perhaps you’ve heard? Second in the world for this most preventable of conditions is the UAE. One in five adults here has it. In fact, in the Gulf there is what can easily be termed a diabetes epidemic occurring.
After the UAE, the next highest rates for the disease occur in Saudi Arabia (16.7 percent), Bahrain (15.2 percent) and Kuwait (14.4 percent). What is going on?
Official statistics from the International Diabetes Federation state baldly that one person dies every ten seconds of diabetes. It’s the fourth main cause of death in developed countries. And for those not yet killed by it, but merely living with it, the symptoms are no fun. In the developed world, it’s the main cause of blindness, and non-accidental limb amputation.
And then there’s the other stuff, like cardiovascular disease (the unsmiling harbinger of the most common terminal event in the civilised world), paralysing strokes, and kidney failure. The list, as lists do, goes on. There is no upside to type two diabetes.
Why does the UAE have such a problem with diabetes? Most of the reasons are obvious, and immediately apparent, after only one waddle through any of the country’s myriad malls or shopping precincts.
The place is hoaching with fast food stores. Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonalds, Burger King and the like; the lurid signs of these purveyors of tasty saturated fats light all corners of the country’s thoroughfares.
And people don’t walk, much less run, to these least healthy of restaurants. They drive. The temperature must play a part. For more than six months of the year, to go outside, even to dispose of fast food detritus, say, pizza boxes, or kebab wrappers, is to return drenched in sweat.
Climatic conditions of over forty degrees Celsius, coupled with grotesque levels of humidity, does not for a healthy outdoors lifestyle make.
And so people, too many people, spend their days either sitting at their desk, if they’re employed, or sitting behind the wheel of their car, or lying about on the sofa eating, one suspects, to alleviate boredom. You don’t need to be a doctor to diagnose this state of affairs as unhealthy. Do you?
Dr Maha Taysir Barakat, Consultant Endinocrinologist and Medical and Research Director at the Imperial College London Diabetes Centre, explains: “It isn’t just UAE nationals who are susceptible to developing diabetes, but all ethnic groups to varying extents.
One of the earlier studies done on prevalence looked at several thousand people, and it found that expats had a prevalence of diabetes higher in this country than they had in their own country. People may be exercising less here than they would at home. They may be walking less. They may be eating more unhealthy food.
“All we can say, without going to a level of detail for which there is no evidence yet, is that it looks like there is a genetic predisposition whereby the diabetes is bought on by a change of lifestyle involving weight gain and a reduction in exercise.”
That sounds like an explanation for what many expats refer to, with a nervous laugh, as the “Dubai stone.”
They mean the extra stone, or two, in weight, that seems to magically appear around their waists shortly after disembarkation from the plane that has ferried them to their new life in the UAE.
Dr Barakat says: “We have followed the cases of expats when they come for health checks. You see that their cholesterol level is excellent when they arrive, but within one or two or three years, you can see their cholesterol has risen significantly, primarily because of a lack of exercise and a change in diet. It affects everybody, all categories of earners.”
Nathalie Haddad, a dietician and nutritionist at the French Medical Centre in Dubai, agrees: “The majority of clients we see are for problems related to weight and obesity. In Dubai there has been an increase in obesity in both adults and children. A lot of people who move to Dubai see an increase in weight. It is due to the lifestyle, the eating habits, lack of physical activity, ease of access to food, and the wide availability of fast food.”
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