As childhood-obesity rates skyrocket, doctors are seeing an alarming rise in a costly disease once unheard of in children: type 2 diabetes. Unlike type 1, or 'juvenile' diabetes—an autoimmune disorder in which the pancreas stops producing insulin—type 2 diabetes is linked to diet and lifestyle. It usually develops only in individuals who are genetically sicken for the condition, but requires a trigger—typically, insulin resistance resulting from overeating. The disease used to be seen only in adults because it took years to exhaust the body's natural insulin production and resistance. No longer. With kids from Austria to Australia eating a diet laden with fats and sugars, type 2 diabetes is striking at ever earlier ages. Says Arian Rosenbloom, a Florida-based pediatric endocrinologist: 'We do not see type 2 in kids of normal weight.' The pattern is similar all over the world. In the United States and Britain, half of the new cases of diabetes in children are type 2, compared with just 4 percent in 1990. In China, where 90 percent of the children who have contracted the disease are now type 2, experts say the incidence has been rising by 9 percent each year since 1992. Between 1975 and 1995 in Japan, cases of type 2 in children increased fourfold. And children in Latin America could see a 45 percent rise in the disease by 2010. The trend mirrors the explosion of diabetes among the general population. In 1985 an estimated 30 million people worldwide had the disease today that number has been more than fivefold, to 177 million, 85 percent of whom have type 2. If modern diet and lifestyle. aren't drastically altered, the World Health Organization expects this number to rise to nearly 300 million cases by 2025—half of them in Asia. The biggest danger of developing diabetes at a younger age is that it allows more time for complications. Among other things, diabetes commonly causes blindness, loss of circulation, heart and kidney disease, strokes and dangerously high blood-sugar levels. For young people with diabetes, the expected life span is 15 years less than average. Neville Rigby, head of policy and public affairs at the International Obesity Task Force, puts it bluntly: 'Some of these children are going to die before their parents.' Ultimately, diabetes is incurable. Although changes in lifestyle. and diet can help stem the progression of the disease, it never disappears. Most patients are on insulin injections a decade after diagnosis. Ralph Abraham, a specialist at the London Diabetes and Lipid Centre, compares trying to develop a healthy body after being diagnosed to 'trying to run up a down escalator.' The best long term hope for reversing the trend is for society to get its weight problem under control. According to the passage, children with type 2 diabetes