Dining out ‘ups diabetes risk’

SYDNEY - Researchers has claimed that corporate lunches and dinners at restaurants dishing up rich, fatty foods, coupled with sedentary working lives are responsible for an alarming rise of diabetes in young men.

Dr Neale Cohen, of the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, said many patients were unaware meals at upmarket restaurants were often as high in fat, salt and sugar as fast food, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.

“Eating out is really code for eating badly. Whether it’s a fine French restaurant or McDonald’s, it’s the type of food that causes the problem,” Dr Cohen said.

He said doctors at the institute are seeing men as young as 40 affected by type 2 diabetes, which is often triggered by obesity and linked to poor diet.

“Many of my patients will eat out three or four times a week for work and we are seeing 40-year-old businessmen who are in real trouble. To have diabetes at that age and otherwise be perfectly well with very little family history, is a really worrying thing,” he said.

Dr Cohen recommends his patients only eat out once a week but said the “MasterChef effect” was encouraging people to re-create the elaborate dishes at home.

Dr Leon Massage, who runs a private weight-loss clinic, Body Metabolism Institute, is also seeing younger patients with type 2 diabetes.

“There is a straight-line relationship between the number of times they dine out a week and their waistline … The aim of every good chef is to create a dish that titillates and makes people salivate and the only way you can do that is … [to] add lots of fat and salt and oil,” Dr Leon added. (ANI)