Diabetics seen as a lucrative new wealth making opportunity

I came across this article today, and felt completely saddened and frustrated reading it. To think that investors are seeing the state of ill health from diabetes as a huge money making opportunity in the future just sucks all round.

What I’m left with is this – drug companies have little interest in people’s health, unless there is profit to be made. Sadly researching and marketing an anti-diabetic diet and lifestyle is not in their interest. There is no money to be made there. (That’s why taxes have to be allocated) However they can make stacks of money from the medications they invent that patch up the mess made by a bad diet and lazy lifestyle.

Look I’m not saying all diabetic medication is bad and nobody should be inventing it, for example insulin pumps make life so much easier for those with type 1 diabetes, and insulin is lifesaving. It’s just that there is such huge money to be made from medication to control blood sugar when just changing ones lifestyle and eating can do the job so much more successfully – and without the side effects. For example Drew Carey.

How “Progress” Created a $174 Billion Epidemic

by Andy Obermueller, (Editor Government Driven Investing Fast Track Millionaire, Game-Changing stocks)

“Two things happened you should know about: food got cheap and work got easy.

Sounds simple when put like that, but it was enough to change the world. Consider a personal example…

On my family’s farm in Kansas, my grandfather’s wheat crop was considered good if it made 10 bushels to the acre. It was planted largely by hand and harvested the same way. Bringing in the crop took two weeks of back-breaking, sunrise-to-sunset labor.

Today, because of agricultural advances, that same bottom ground, which is still in our family, can grow 70 bushels an acre. Bringing in the wheat crop still takes nearly two weeks, but it’s more tedious than back-breaking. And now my family plants more than 10 times Grandpa’s original quarter and still harvests it with half as many people. That’s helped the price of consumption plummet.

And because of the advances, I didn’t have to hang around the farm to get a job. I don’t till the land or run cattle. I make a living in an office, behind a desk. Most days I don’t do anything more physically strenuous than chew. I am productive, but I am nevertheless effectively sedentary. I’m in nowhere near the shape that Grandpa Ted was when he was my age, nor am I in as good a shape as my family members who stayed on the farm. Like I said, work got easy. They call it “progress.”

As the Chief Strategist behind Game-Changing Stocks, I’m always on the lookout for what I call “game-changing” situations. These are instances where a major shift is taking place. I’ve found these shifts are usually accompanied by spectacular opportunities to profit.

You just read about two game-changing shifts — technology has brought us both cheap food and easy work.

And that’s leading to another shift… and an opportunity to profit. Cheap food and easy work are the new reality. And unfortunately, that means diabetes.

Fourteen million Americans have been diagnosed with the disease. Another six million have it and don’t know it, and — astonishingly — another 41 million have pre-diabetes — overtaxed metabolisms combined with poor eating habits and a lack of exercise. Diabetes in this country, and around the world, is a ticking time bomb.

Even now, the cost of the disease is already astronomical. The American Diabetes Association (ADA) says the national cost of the disease in the U.S. alone exceeded $174 billion in 2007. (Health stats take forever to collect, so those three-year-old stats are the best we have.) The ADA’s estimate includes $116 billion in medical costs like drugs and doctor’s visits and hospitalizations, and $58 billion from sick time. I’ve been a Type I diabetic (juvenile onset, thought to be genetic) for 30 years. I can attest to just how easily this disease can keep you from a day’s work.

I wouldn’t wish diabetes on anyone; I can tell you firsthand, it’s a lousy burden to carry. But from an investment standpoint, this medical condition is just about perfect — it has a huge and growing patient base. Those patients can live a relatively normal and long life, every day of which will require them to consume diabetic supplies, and there is no cure on the immediate horizon.

Usually when I find game-changing opportunities, it’s in a nascent field. The discovery usually comes with plenty of small companies sitting on the edge of a breakthrough — think of how Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) changed the game when it came to something as simple as renting a movie.

But in the case of diabetes, many of the firms are larger. Bristol-Myers Squibb  and Johnson & Johnson are working on potential blockbuster drugs called SGLT-2 inhibitors. And Medtronic makes the gold standard in insulin pumps and should see a nice bump in business as the diabetes epidemic grows.

Action to Take –> These aren’t the tiny up-and-comers that I’ve made a living off of discovering, but when it comes to investing, you can’t argue with profits.”

A note on SGLT-2 inhibitors: Doctors treating diabetics are very excited about these new type of drugs: They simply cause excess blood glucose to be dumped into the urine. Clinical results reported so far indicate that these agents reduce glycated hemoglobin levels (HbA1C) by about 0.9% with a few months of treatment.

See this article: Interest Builds for SGLT2 Inhibitors

A while back I posted a letter from a type 1 diabetic who found traditional nutrition advice did nothing to fix his diabetes and only by following a low carb diet did he get blood sugar control. Here
In this article I also looked at what diets actually work reverse type 2 diabetes. Interestingly the results of low carbohydrate and paleolithic diets are far superior to the new drug. 1.5% decrease in HbA1C compared with 0.9%.

So if you are a diabetic who happens to be reading this blog, who is continuing to line the pockets of wealthy investors, while consuming a diet that is not working to control your diabetes, isn’t it about time to change?