Black Death Argumentative Essay

A. Intro/Abstract

One can make a good argument that the most valuable thing you possess is your health. While good health should not be the objective of living, it is a resource for everyday life that one can use to reach their full potential. Without good health, defined by WHO as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”, it can become hard to reach one’s full potential and it can place hardships not only on the person with failing health but also on their loved ones (3).

B. The Media

In the past the leading causes of death in the United States, and around most of the world, were infectious diseases, primarily as a result of the lack of accurate health information

The centenarians were found to have succumbed to diseases in 100% of cases examined. People don’t die as a consequence of maturing. They die from disease, most commonly heart attacks. (1) http://nutritionfacts.org/video/spin-doctors-how-the-media-reports-on-medicine/ Diabetes, specifically type 2, has been called “the Black Death of the twenty-first century” with respect to its exponential spread around the world and its devastating health impacts. In place of the bubonic plague, though, the pathological agents in obesity and type 2 diabetes are identified as “high-fat and high-calorie diets,” and instead of fleas and rodents, the causes are “advertisements and inducements to poor lifestyle” (3). More than twenty illion Americans are currently diagnosed with diabetes, a tripling of cases since 1990

C. Diabetes

Diabetics also have chronically elevated levels of sugar in their blood, both due to either a diabetic’s pancreas gland not secreting enough insulin as with type one diabetics or their body becomes resistant to insulin’s key like effect of letting sugar into cells. Too much sugar and it overwhelms the kidneys and spills into the urine making it sweet to the taste, which is how people tested the urine of people suspected of being diabetic before modern laboratory techniques