Even more interesting is the fact that apparently folks in India are particularly susceptible to diabetes: "Because Indians have such a pronounced genetic vulnerability to the disease, they tend to contract it 10 years earlier than people in developed countries," the Times reports. "It is because India is so youthful — half the population is under 25 — that the future of diabetes here is so chilling." In 20 years, that could mean a whopping 75 million Indians will have the disease.

Clearly diabetes is exceptionally prevalent worldwide these days, due in large part to the sedentary nature of the modern lifestyle, plus the increasingly unhealthy foods we consume. But this article made me wonder: Since Type 2 diabetes does seem to affect relatively wealthy societies and is strongly linked to obesity, and since being overweight was long seen as a sign of prosperity (and therefore prestige) until fairly recently in history, shouldn't there have been mini diabetes epidemics sometime in the past?

This fascinating timeline shows that the earliest recorded case was actually during the Egyptian empire, and apparently the disease was fairly widespread in the first few centuries C.E. Thankfully, we don't live in the late 1850s, when a French physician advised eating large quantities of sugar to cure diabetes... No, now we have food manufacturers and advertisers to tell us that instead, and it's not just diabetics who are encouraged to eat more sugar--it's all of us! Who needs lame-o doctors? Who needs the French?!?!