Does Your Child Have Diabetes Curriculum
Introduction
Welcome to Gee-Mart!
Here is a complete package that is exciting, hopeful and long overdue. It is an innovative educational tool aimed at substantively reducing the horrendous number of those affected by diabetes in our times. This curriculum targets underserved communities..
It is given that diabetes is a health- and life-threatening illness. Most people have family members, friends or acquaintances, whose lives and well-being are adversely affected. More often children are diagnosed with adult onset diabetes. Diabetes was a virtually unknown disease in the distant past. People are experiencing early loss of eyesight, damage to vital organs, losing limbs and experiencing sexual impotency or nerve damage, resulting from this debilitating disease. Some people are becoming disabled in their forties and fifties or not even surviving to the American life expectancy. Diabetes affects the whole person.
Considerable amounts of money are spent each year related to diabetes treatments. Only in recent times have there been more attention to the skyrocketing costs associated with this disease. Increasingly, it affects job performance, school attendance, and the quality of life for diabetes patients and their families.
Gee-Mart, Inc. recognizes that not only does diabetes deal harshly with the average White American, but for various reasons it poses an even greater threat to the underserved people of other ethnicities and cultures. This disease has reached near pandemic proportions among Latino Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and people of Appalachian heritage.
Reasons for the high prevalence of diabetes among the underserved include:

•Genetic differences in how the body processes fat
•Inactivity and obesity
•Language barriers and poor knowledge of available health services
•Mobility difficulties
•Differences in accessibility and willingness to seek medical exams and help
•Social deprivation and the lack of education, which create barriers to health care.
Unfortunately, diabetes is becoming more and more prevalent. Evolving lifestyle changes among the underserved is the undercurrent of the high rate of diabetes. When people shift from basic and whole food diets of long ago and replace it with fast and highly processed foods, combined with the lack of activity or exercise, the results are often diabetes and obesity, with all the related complications.
Take a look at the dense populations of our inner cities, which are populated with significantly high numbers of underserved and financially challenged people of color. One report notes that there is approximately a 30 percent higher number of diabetes diagnoses in our inner cities, which directly correlates with the number of junk food and convenience food establishments within those areas. What a self-explanatory tale that is!