Diabetes, Diet and Health Care

But I don't know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention--it's about diet, not diabetes. It's going to be very, very exciting. But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.--Nancy Pelosi 3/10/10



This astonishing statement by one of the nation's most powerful will draw a lot of criticism over the next weeks and months for the last sentence which sounds like a stand-up punch line. More interesting is what proceeds it. In the "it's about diet, not diabetes" is hidden the notion that there is a science and a medicine that has been obscured by current insurance and medical practice that waits only for the government to reveal it. This statemente, arrogance aside, exhibits a staggering misunderstanding of the nature of disease, its complexity and mysteries. Diabetes is a systemic abnormality that involves blood vessels, nerves and muscles and is manifested by the mismanagement of glucose, its transport and metabolism on a cellular level. The very suggestion that diet will eliminate this difficult problem smacks of imitative magic. That a powerful politician could say something as ill-informed, during a debate over a health plan she helped create, implies an illness in the body politic that might require an exorcism.