- CDC data shows diabetes prevalence has reached 15.8% of U.S. adults, with 11.3% diagnosed and 4.5% undiagnosed, highlighting an urgent need for increased screening and prevention
- Men face higher diabetes risk (18%) compared to women (13.7%), while rates surge dramatically with age, affecting 27.3% of adults over 60 and 24.2% of those with obesity
- The HOMA-IR test provides a simple way to detect insulin resistance early, calculating the relationship between fasting glucose and insulin levels to evaluate metabolic health
- Excess linoleic acid, found in seed oils and processed foods, triggers inflammation and disrupts insulin signaling pathways, making cells less responsive to insulin and accelerating the progression toward diabetes
- A significant increase in linoleic acid consumption since the mid-20th century contributes to diabetes by disrupting mitochondrial function and cellular energy production
(Mercola)—Nearly 1 in 6 American adults now live with diabetes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).1 The data, from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) spanning August 2021 to August 2023, reveal that the overall prevalence of diabetes in the U.S. has climbed to 15.8%.
This figure includes both diagnosed and undiagnosed cases, with 11.3% of adults aware they have diabetes and an additional 4.5% living with the condition without a formal diagnosis. The rise in total diabetes prevalence marks a significant public health challenge, underscoring the need for increased awareness, early detection and effective management strategies.2
Diabetes often leads to severe complications affecting your nervous system, kidneys, eyes, heart and blood vessels, making prevention and treatment essential for optimal health. Mitochondrial poisons that harm your cellular energy production are a driving force behind chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes.
Higher Diabetes Rates Among Men, Older Adults and Those with Obesity
If you’re male, the statistics show that you’re at a higher risk for both total and diagnosed diabetes compared to women. The NHANES data indicate that 18% of U.S. men have diabetes, with only 12.9% of them being diagnosed, versus 13.7% and 9.7% for women, respectively.3 This gender disparity suggests that men may need to be even more vigilant about their health concerning diabetes.
While the prevalence of undiagnosed diabetes doesn’t differ significantly between men and women, the higher rates of diagnosed diabetes in men highlight the importance of regular screenings and proactive health measures. Factors contributing to this increased risk in men could include lifestyle choices, biological differences and possibly lower rates of health care utilization.
As you age, your risk of developing diabetes also increases. According to the CDC findings, diabetes prevalence jumps from 3.6% in adults aged 20 to 39 to a staggering 27.3% in those 60 and older.4 Additionally, weight plays a role in this risk. Individuals with obesity face a diabetes prevalence of 24.2%, compared to 12.3% in the overweight category and 6.8% among those with normal or underweight status.5
These trends highlight how both aging and increased weight status significantly elevate your chances of developing diabetes. Managing your weight through a healthy diet and regular physical activity will substantially reduce your risk.
The NHANES data also show a clear inverse relationship between educational attainment and the prevalence of diabetes. Adults with only a high school diploma, GED or less have a total diabetes prevalence of 19.6%, which decreases to 10.7% among those holding a bachelor’s degree or higher.6
Similarly, diabetes rates drop from 14.6% in less educated groups to 7.3% in those with advanced education. This correlation suggests that higher education levels may provide better access to health information, resources and healthier lifestyle choices, all of which contribute to lower diabetes risk.
Understanding HOMA-IR — A Simple Test for Insulin Resistance
Recognizing insulin resistance early is essential, as it’s a warning sign for your metabolic health — one that often precedes Type 2 diabetes. The HOMA-IR (Homeostatic Model Assessment of Insulin Resistance) is a valuable diagnostic tool that helps assess insulin resistance through a simple blood test. Created in 1985, it calculates the relationship between your fasting glucose and insulin levels to evaluate how effectively your body uses insulin.
Unlike other more complex tests, HOMA-IR requires just one fasting blood sample, making it both practical and accessible. This simplicity allows doctors and patients to screen for early signs of insulin resistance, monitor prediabetes risk, track treatment effectiveness over time and guide intervention strategies. The HOMA-IR formula is as follows:
HOMA-IR = (Fasting Glucose x Fasting Insulin) / 405, where
- Fasting glucose is measured in mg/dL
- Fasting insulin is measured in μIU/mL (microinternational units per milliliter), and
- 405 is a constant that normalizes the values
If you’re using mmol/L for glucose instead of mg/dL, the formula changes slightly:
HOMA-IR = (Fasting Glucose x Fasting Insulin) / 22.5, where
- Fasting glucose is measured in mmol/L
- Fasting insulin is measured in μIU/mL, and
- 22.5 is the normalizing factor for this unit of measurement
Anything below 1.0 is considered a healthy HOMA-IR score. If you’re above that, you’re considered insulin resistant. The higher your values, the greater your insulin resistance. Conversely the lower your HOMA-IR score, the less insulin resistance you have, assuming you are not a Type 1 diabetic who makes no insulin. Insulin resistance often exists long before obvious signs of trouble, silently disrupting your body’s balance and setting the stage for serious conditions later.
Interestingly, my personal HOMA-IR score stands at a low 0.2. This low score is a testament to my body’s enhanced efficiency in burning fuel, a result of increased glucose availability. By incorporating additional carbohydrates into my diet, I provided my cells with the necessary energy to operate more effectively.
This improved cellular function has significantly boosted my metabolic health, demonstrating how strategic dietary adjustments lead to better insulin sensitivity and overall metabolic performance.
Are Nutrient Deficiencies Involved?
Lifestyle changes such as diet and exercise have been shown to prevent Type 2 diabetes more effectively than the drug metformin alone,7 however nutrient deficiencies may also play a role. Vitamin B6, for instance, plays a role in blood sugar regulation through “first responder” beta cells in the pancreas. Some cases of diabetes may, in fact, be linked to vitamin B6 deficiency or dysfunction.8
Further, there’s an inverse relationship between vitamin D and HbA1c levels, a key marker of long-term blood sugar control — as vitamin D increases, HbA1c decreases.9 This suggests that maintaining adequate vitamin D levels, ideally through safe sun exposure, helps manage blood sugar and reduce your risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.
Minerals like zinc,10 magnesium and chromium are also essential for glycemic regulation. Magnesium supplementation, for instance, has been shown to enhance insulin sensitivity in diabetic patients and improve symptoms of depression and anxiety.11
By ensuring adequate intake of these vitamins and trace minerals through diet, targeted supplementation or sunlight exposure in the case of vitamin D, you may be able to support both your blood sugar control and mental well-being. However, another pernicious dietary factor is involved in driving the chronic disease epidemic, including Type 2 diabetes — linoleic acid (LA).
The LA Surge — A Decade of Dietary Change and Metabolic Impact
You may not realize it, but your diet today is vastly different from what it was just a century ago, particularly in your intake of LA. Since the mid-20th century, the consumption of LA, an omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acid found in seed oils and most processed foods, has skyrocketed in Western diets. This dramatic increase coincides with the unprecedented rise in chronic metabolic diseases like obesity and Type 2 diabetes mellitus.12
While LA is essential for maintaining healthy skin and other bodily functions, its overconsumption raises concerns about its role as a metabolic poison that interferes with mitochondrial function and disrupts glucose homeostasis. Historically, humans consumed LA at much lower levels, and our bodies evolved to manage these amounts effectively.
However, the modern abundance of LA overwhelms these regulatory systems, contributing to insulin resistance and impaired glucose metabolism, as explained in a review published in Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids.13 As you make dietary choices, understanding the surge in LA intake and its metabolic repercussions is key to avoiding diabetes and reversing it if you’ve already been diagnosed.
How Linoleic Acid Disrupts Glucose Balance
When you consume LA, it undergoes various metabolic processes, leading to the formation of bioactive metabolites like oxidized linoleic acid metabolites (OXLAMs) and arachidonic acid (AA). These metabolites interfere with insulin signaling, a component in maintaining your blood glucose levels.
For instance, certain OXLAMs have been shown to impair insulin secretion from pancreatic beta-cells, the very cells responsible for regulating your blood sugar.14 Additionally, AA-derived eicosanoids promote inflammation and oxidative stress, further disrupting insulin sensitivity in your muscles and liver.
This biochemical turmoil makes it harder for your body to utilize glucose effectively, paving the way for insulin resistance and, eventually, diabetes. Understanding these molecular disruptions highlights the importance of moderating LA intake to preserve the delicate balance of your glucose homeostasis and prevent the onset of metabolic disorders like diabetes.
Inflammation and Insulin Resistance — The Hidden Link of LA
Inflammation plays a pivotal role in the development of insulin resistance, and LA is intricately connected to this process. When you consume high levels of LA, your body produces more proinflammatory eicosanoids, which trigger chronic low-grade inflammation. This persistent inflammatory state interferes with insulin signaling pathways, making your cells less responsive to insulin’s effects.
As a result, your body needs to produce more insulin to achieve the same glucose-lowering effect, leading to hyperinsulinemia. Over time, this compensatory mechanism exhausts your pancreatic beta-cells, reducing insulin production and exacerbating insulin resistance. Moreover, inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein and interleukin-6, which are elevated with increased LA intake, have been linked to higher risks of developing Type 2 diabetes.15
By fostering an inflammatory environment, excessive LA consumption not only disrupts your metabolic balance but also accelerates the progression toward diabetes. Recognizing this hidden link emphasizes the need for dietary strategies that minimize inflammation to maintain insulin sensitivity and metabolic health.
Lack of Cellular Energy Drives Chronic Diseases Like Diabetes
The primary reason why excess LA is harmful to your health is because it disrupts your cellular powerhouses — the mitochondria. Think of mitochondria as tiny energy factories in your cells that produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the essential fuel that keeps your cells running and repairing themselves.
Without energy, your cells can’t repair and regenerate themselves. So, the fundamental issue underlying most chronic disease is that your cells are not producing enough energy. In addition to LA, exposure to synthetic endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), estrogen and pervasive electromagnetic fields (EMFs) also impair your cells’ ability to generate energy efficiently.
This energy deficit makes it challenging to sustain the oxygen-free gut environment necessary for beneficial bacteria like Akkermansia to flourish, further complicating the problem.
Instead, a lack of cellular energy creates an environment in the gut that favors endotoxin-producing bacteria, further damaging mitochondria, triggering insulin resistance and creating a vicious cycle of worsening health. By tackling the “Four E’s” — excess LA, estrogens (xenoestrogens found in everyday items like plastic), EMFs and endotoxins — you restore you cellular energy and start down the path toward optimal health.
- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 NCHS Data Brief No. 516, November 2024
- 7 BMC Endocr Disord. 2023 Sep 18;23:198
- 8 Science Advances June 26, 2024
- 9 Apollo Medicine April 2024
- 10, 11 Nutrients. 2023 Sep 10;15(18):3929
- 12, 13, 14, 15 Prostaglandins Leukot Essent Fatty Acids. 2021 Oct 29;175:102366
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
