Childhood Health Crisis

Is there actually a childhood health crisis in our country? Before I talk about the four things they described, is diabetes on the rise in our country? Yes. When I was in my first year of residency training, I'm actually in medical school 96 to 2000, I was told I'd never see a kid with type 2 diabetes. It had to be type 1. If you saw a kid with diabetes, it had to be, no question asked, type 1 diabetes, because kids did not get type 2 diabetes. In 2001, I saw my first 16 year old kid with type 2 diabetes. And now we're looking at something like 10 to 15% of kids having insulin resistance and being on the verge of being type 2 diabetic. Something like 5% are already type 2. So what's happened is something that was rare, that I was told in my initial training I would never see now is actually quite common.