--- title: Obesity Is A Big Contributor To Diabetes Boom description: BMI is the biggest culprit to blame for diabetes, study finds canonical: https://time.com/3224427/obesity-big-diabetes-contributor/ author: Mandy Oaklander article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-09-01T21:00:32.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-21T09:56:31.182Z article:section: Health og:title: Obesity Is A Big Contributor To Diabetes Boom og:description: BMI is the biggest culprit to blame for diabetes, study finds og:url: https://time.com/3224427/obesity-big-diabetes-contributor/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Obesity Is A Big Contributor To Diabetes Boom twitter:description: BMI is the biggest culprit to blame for diabetes, study finds twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # Obesity Is A Big Contributor To Diabetes Boom > Sponsored content. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators.  by [Mandy Oaklander](https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/)  ## Mandy Oaklander Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Sep 1, 2014 9:00 PM UTC  by [Mandy Oaklander](https://time.com/author/mandy-oaklander/)  ## Mandy Oaklander Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Sep 1, 2014 9:00 PM UTC Diabetes is one of the most common diseases in the U.S., and there’s a single biggest culprit to blame, found a new [study](http://annals.org/article.aspx?doi=10.7326/M14-0180) released today in _Annals of Internal Medicine_: our ever-increasing body mass index, or BMI. The team analyzed data from five National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys of a nationally representative U.S. sample of 23,932 people. They found that the prevalence of diabetes almost doubled from 1976 to 1980 as well as from 1999 to 2004. BMI explained most of the increase in the prevalence of diabetes, even more than other big factors like race, ethnicity and age, lead study author Andy Menke, an epidemiologist with Social & Scientific Systems, wrote in an email to TIME. “There has been a substantial increase in obesity in the US population during this study,” he wrote. Intriguingly, diabetes prevalence increased more in men than in women. And after taking changes in age, race, ethnicity and BMI into account, Menke’s team found that diabetes prevalence still increased in men, but not in women. The reason for that gender gap is not entirely clear, but might be due to factors that fell outside the scope of the study like differences in survival between men and women after being diagnosed with diabetes, physical activity, sleep patterns, vitamin D levels, psychological stress and depression, and exposure to pollutants and toxins, Menke wrote. “Decreasing the occurrence of being overweight and obesity remains an important intervention to reduce the burden of diabetes,” the study authors wrote. 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