Fatality Rate
Diabetes mellitus is a disease that claimed the lives of 1,777,544 Mexicans between the years of 1999 and 2020. This is a number of deaths greater than the total population currently residing in the state of Zacatecas. The Silent Killer, as the disease is commonly referred to, has more than tripled its annual gruesome toll over the past two decades. It has come to the point that in 2020, diabetes was the cause of death of more than 150,000 Mexican nationals.
A measure of how severe of a public health crisis Mexico comparatively faces with regards to diabetes is the fact that the diseases’ fatality rate in the country is at a level that exceeds the combined fatality rate of drug overdose, intentional self-harm, homicide, transport accident AND diabetes as causes of death in the United States.
In addition to being a leading cause of death, diabetes has resulted in the permanent disability of even more Mexicans due to blindness, nerve damage that requires amputations and kidney failure.
It is an established and well-known fact that sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) represent a major source of rapidly digestible and high-volume sugars leading to type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Mexico is the worldwide leader in SSB consumption in the form of carbonated soft drinks, with its population annually guzzling 176 liters/capita of Coca-Cola products (vs. 95 in the US and 22 globally).
In Mexico, mortality attributable to SSBs has been calculated to be in the order of 40,842 yearly deaths, mainly because they are the source of 70% of added sugar in the country’s diet.
With SSBs playing a most important causal role in the accelerating diabetes apocalypse destroying Mexican families, it is high-time that government take further action to make industry accountable for its negative externalities.
Sugar in Coca-Cola beverages, similarly to nicotine in Marlboro cigarettes and oxycodone in Oxycontin pills, is a highly addictive substance pushed to millions of consumers with the help of gigantic marketing budgets and untold lobbying efforts designed to avoid government regulation.
Actions such as those advocated by the OECD and AMA—increased excise taxes, restrictions on advertising, and the removal of options to purchase—are warranted and necessary in order to curb SSB consumption in Mexico given the very heavy burden it imposes on the country’s development and the threat it represents to the stability of its public health care system.