Pat Kringas, RN, MA, CDE is a Certified Diabetes Educator at the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center in Northern Manhattan. She has also recently become the Education Director at the Center. Here, she explains to us why diabetes has become so much more common today. 

Q: Why is diabetes a much bigger issue today than it was in the past?

A: There are a lot of things happening in our lives that make us much more likely to get diabetes than the generation before us. For older adults like me, we now know a lot more about how to prevent diabetes than our parents did. But besides just having less information, people from earlier generations also lived differently; they had to walk places, they got out and hiked, and they did a lot more physical activity than we do today. They even had more physical jobs. Today, we sit in front of computers more and more. It used to just be that TV was the problem, but now it's TV, the computer and movies! And we don't even have to walk to get the movie anymore because we have Netflix^TM or something else like it to deliver it right to our door!

Nowadays there are also things like Vitamin Water^TM that have become very popular lately. I have three teenagers who started bringing Vitamin Water^TM home - they thought it had a cool bottle. The unhealthy drink crept into my house and I'm an expert on this kind of stuff. It's nothing but a cool bottle! There's nothing healthy in it! It's just a lot of sugar! It's not a judgment­­-it happened to me and it happens to all of us-but we have to set limits in our homes and keep those sugary drinks out.

In addition, just a few years ago coffee used to be coffee. Today, it's very hip to go to a coffee shop and order fancy coffee drinks instead of before when you'd just get plain coffee. Now it's coffee with sugar, whipped cream, hazelnut sweetener and espresso-all in one drink! A lot of sugar creeps into people's diets without them even realizing it. When you explain to people the amount of sugar that they are taking in, they are shocked.

It's these things in our daily lives that is making diabetes a lot more common today.

Q: What are people in the community doing to help people make healthier decisions about their diet?

A: I think that the Harlem community is very dedicated to turning things around to make Harlem a healthier place for the next generation. I think that the African American Churches are preaching the importance of good health, people are talking about it, and the community members are getting out walking and trying to make a difference to say "enough" to setting such an unhealthy example! Some big churches in Harlem are even no longer offering Kool-Aid^TM or sweetened drinks at coffee and fellowship hours in their pledge to be healthier.

Read more from Pat Kringas by clicking the links below:

• Difference between diabetes and pre-diabetes
• Who is more likely to get diabetes

To listen to our interview with Pat Kringas, click here for our podcast page.

Harlem Word is a series of interviews with Harlem health experts, written by HHPC and reviewed by our Health Advisory Board.