Diabetes has been listed to be one of the biggest public health threats in the United Kingdom and other parts of the world. This is because this disease is said to be the major cause of death and disability. Even though the diabetes epidemic has been discovered to have recently levelled off, it has claimed many lives between the years 1990 and 2008. Tuichinsky and Varavikova (2014:445) state that '' nutrition plays a key role in the causation and management of type 2 diabetes.'' It is, however, mentioned that type 2 diabetes can be reduced significantly in adults, if guidance is followed accordingly. In other words, diabetes is a public health inequality because it is avoidable and it can be prevented.
Public health can be defined as the upgrade of a population's well-being.This can be in the form of mental and physical fitness, or improvement of lifestyle. WHO (2015), defines public health as the
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Approximately 80 % of patients with type 2 diabetes are obese. Diabetes is centred around monitoring one's blood sugar levels, a healthy or balanced diet and regular exercise. There may be other risk factors of type 2 diabetes like genetics, stress, and demographic characteristics, but, obesity still has the biggest connection with this disease. Statistics show that around 90% of diabetic adults in the UK have type 2 diabetes. It is believed that people with type 2 diabetes live in low to middle income regions in the United Kingdom. Diabetes type 2 is most commonly diagnosed in adults. While research shows that many of the symptoms of type 1 and 2 diabetes are similar, the public health implications of these two types are very different; type 2 diabetes is the biggest priority for public health – it accounts for most of the diabetes in the UK, it is largely preventable but often remains undiagnosed