Initiative to Combat NZ's Fastest-Growing Epidemic

Diabetes NZ Initiative to Combat Nation’s Fastest-Growing Epidemic

Diabetes New Zealand today marks the beginning of Diabetes Action Month by launching a comprehensive online support and self-management toolkit, to help address the nation’s fastest-growing health crisis.

Twelve hundred people in New Zealand[i], on average, will this month be told that they have diabetes. Forty people per day[ii], every day, during Diabetes Action Month.

More than 260,000 people in New Zealand have diabetes[iii]; the prevalence has doubled in the past 10 years.

“There is a real need to help people with diabetes to live well,” Steve Crew, chief executive of Diabetes New Zealand, says.

“The reality of diabetes and the complications associated with it, can be consuming. It is not only a drain on our health system, it is incredibly life-changing and life-limiting for people living with diabetes – and that can lead to stress and anxiety and poor self-care.”

Diabetes New Zealand surveyed the nation in a Perceptive Research omnibus[iv] that revealed that less than half of those living with diabetes felt they are in control of their condition, and a third said it had a negative effect on their mental wellbeing.

“Living well is something people with diabetes battle to do on their own,” Crew says. “A third struggle with eating healthy meals, and almost 40 per cent struggle to be motivated and do physical activity. Diabetes New Zealand wants to change that.”

The Diabetes New Zealand Take Control Toolkit unveiled today will be a range of more than 60 online materials in downloadable print or video formats, that Diabetes New Zealand members anywhere in the country can access, offering them advice and information across three important categories – Food & Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Health & Wellbeing.

As the voice of those living with diabetes, the organisation wanted to gauge the public’s view on the proposition of taxation on sugar and fat in some foods.

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