Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies?

If you're going to try an appeal to authority, then at least come up with a plausible authority instead of some random statistician who likely doesn't know the basics of physiology. The first thing you need to understand is that normal ≠ healthy. For example, a resting heart rate of up to 100 bpm is considered "normal" in the sense that it doesn't require urgent medical intervention. But of course anything over 60 bpm for an adult usually indicates some underlying pathology with a risk of premature morbidity and mortality.

The essence of type 2 diabetes is insulin resistance. Like many medical conditions it exists on a spectrum. The specific HbA1c thresholds of 5.7% for pre-diabetes and 6.5% for diabetes are inherently arbitrary and serve mainly to make communication easier. But there is a clear correlation between elevated HbA1c levels and higher all-cause mortality.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2017-015949

Also note that HbA1c tests aren't perfect for diagnosing type 2 diabetes and can have false positives or false negatives. If there is reason to suspect diabetes then it would be wise to conduct additional tests to get a better understanding of the patient's metabolic condition.

https://peterattiamd.com/ama15/

Even the federal reserve is privately owned though.

> My view is that diabetes is an urgent national scandal. Over 100 million Americans have diabetes or prediabetes, and 100,000 die from the condition annually. In addition, every year hundreds of thousands of people with diabetes have limbs amputated or suffer blindness or kidney disease. Diabetes costs our country $400bn annually to treat.

So about 4x as many deaths per year as homicide, twice as many as suicide, twice as many as car crashes, twice as many as accidental falls, and a multiple of plenty of other preventable causes of death. Obviously some of these other types of deaths take far more years off people's lives than diabetes, but I think the author is right to call it an urgent national scandal.

> Her meticulous account depicts the world’s most important diabetes patient advocacy organization as a cynical fund-raising machine, anxious to please its corporate overlords at the expense of the millions of people with diabetes it is supposed to be trying to help. “The defendant’s conduct shows that they were party to a scheme to defraud the American people by approving and endorsing recipes submitted by Splenda to be lauded by the ADA as a healthy choice for people with diabetes, when the ADA knew that those recipes were contrary to the ADA’s guidelines and well-established and emerging scientific principles,” the complaint reads. In case you’re curious, the ADA and Splenda appear to be still at it. As I write this, the ADA’s Diabetes Food Hub web page still features no fewer than 203 recipes – some marked “sponsored”, some not – that include Splenda, whose parent company’s $1m contribution has brought to light the utter insanity of our diabetes epidemic.

I really wish this could have gone to the discovery phase. Hopefully there will be investigations.

> And although type-2 diabetes is often reversible through a low-carbohydrate diet, the ADA and the pharmaceutical industry don’t seem very interested in acknowledging that. Instead, they promote a laundry list of corporate deals and pharmaceutical treatments that have failed to stem the disease’s lethal and expensive impact on American life.

I'm not naïve enough to think that all (or even most) of the tens of thousands of people dying from type 2 diabetes each year would be saved if the ADA didn't give poor advice, but I also think it's wrong to think that it'd have had no impact: insulin has been infamously expensive for many years in the US, and insulin pumps are thousands of dollars. I certainly think some of the millions of people who ended up dying from type 2 diabetes would have made lifestyle changes had it been made clear that it's often reversible with diet changes, if for no other reason than to save money. If you don't have a pump, having to take insulin shots throughout the day is a pain the ass, so again, I think some people would have made lifestyle changes to avoid that had it been made clear that it was an option.

I apologize, this is such a strange way to be positioned to all this. The point of bringing up something like the practice of slavery in early America is not about "blaming" people about anything. They are already dead! Many generations over. This conceit that the bare acknowledgement of history itself should merely serve to assign blame or culpability to certain people or another feels just so wrong.

The point is that it happened. It was determined and sustained by countless totally mechanical and impersonal conditions and tendencies. Just as the operative ideologies in play in the minds of all our fave founding fathers can only be viewed from our purview as some composite of factors, not as some collection of good guys and bad guys. To point out that maybe they should not be a moral compass to us today is not scapegoating them in some grand moral court of human existence! Its just making a point, and urging historical context as a tool to maybe be a little more rational about our world today. There is nothing at stake but that.