DISCOVER HEALTH AROUND THE WORLD

I read a book called “Traveling with sugar” recently. Belize is a small island country in the Caribbean. They produce a lot of sugar. Unfortunately, the sugar does not only represent the product of refined sugar cane. It is also the abbreviation of “diabetes”, countless people were killed because of the sugar. The local people not only live in the shadow of the sugar cane fields, but when diabetes spreads like a plague across the country, many people are struggling with this disease. 

You will think the majority of people probably get a bad diet. The fact is that in the sugar cane fields where the people cannot grow vegetables on their land, sugarcane was very overbearing and plundered a lot of land. Almost nothing could survive on the land where sugarcane was planted except a few willows and bananas. A more serious problem is that as the nutrients in the land in Belize are slowly being sucked out by the sugarcane fields, sugar industry operators begin to invest a large amount of chemical fertilizers and herbicides to maintain a stable output of sugarcane. This has fostered a horrific vicious cycle. Sugar cane harvests are bumper every year, but the accumulated pollution on the land is getting deeper and deeper. 

In modern medicine, diabetes is still a disease full of mysteries which has never stopped arguing about what causes this disease. Some experts  pointed out that many studies in recent years have confirmed that industrial pollution in the environment is closely related to diabetes. Various chemical factors can easily cause physical diseases. In other words, in the scarred land of Belize, no matter how good an individual’s living habits are, it is difficult to curb the diabetes craze caused by the accumulation of poison and pollution from generation to generation.

Amy Moran-Thomas, 2019, Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic. University of California Press.