Health Myth: Can You Get Diabetes If You’re Young and Thin?


Most people think diabetes is a disease for the old and the junk-food feasting. Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Nick Jonas, Vanessa Williams, and Jay Cutler would disagree—they’ve all been diagnosed with type 1 or type 2 diabetes.

Diabetes among the young and thin is more than a red-carpet phenomenon: Among thirtysomethings, rates of diabetes-related hospitalizations have doubled in the past decade, and 79 million adults age 20 and older are estimated to have prediabetes—that’s up from 57 million in 2007.

What’s more, according to Louis Philipson, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Kovler Diabetes Center at the University of Chicago, 15 percent of type 2 diabetics aren’t even overweight. A Journal of the American Medical Association study shows that nearly one in four skinny people has prediabetes and is “metabolically obese.” And to top it all off, men develop diabetes at a lower body-mass index than women do.

Read the article at Details.com


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