I think diabetes is affecting more people in the general population than specific ethnic groups now. I discussed this a little bit with Queenie yesterday after she posted the poll. I had to run around and poll the people I knew with diabetes. My brother-in-law and his son are both juvenile diabetics. The mother-in-law is Irish Catholic, and the father-in-law is methodist with an English/Scandavian ancestry. I'm fairly sure my mother's boyfriend (also a juvenile diabetic) is some sort of christian, but I don't know him very well. And I had to run over to my diabetic black coworker to ask her religion, which is Baptist.
While diabetes can affect certain ethnicities more (a quick search says Hispanics, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans, and Pacific Islander Americans are more likely than any other group), diabetes seems to be a growing concern. I could be wildly off base, but I think it's because of our diet of processed foods, plus all of the sugar and fake-sugar we digest, which our bodies can't handle. Add to it our increasingly sedentary lifestyles (how many people work in an office sitting for 8 hours a day instead of doing manual labor?), and it's no wonder that more and more people are being affected by diabetes.
