MI–0010 Recorded September 6, 2026
Diabetes is caused by corporations
Diabetes is caused by corporations.
Refined insight
The root cause of the type 2 diabetes epidemic is the corporate incentive structure.
What we mean—and what we do not
The deliberately provocative original wording is not a claim that corporations cause every form or every individual case of diabetes. It identifies a proposed population-level cause of the modern type 2 diabetes epidemic.
Human biology explains how type 2 diabetes develops in an individual. Genetics, age, activity, sleep, medication, socioeconomic conditions, food choices, and other factors all affect individual risk.
The deeper systemic question is different: Why does the environment produce so much repeated exposure to the conditions that raise that risk across an entire population?
Follow the incentives upstream
Large food corporations are rewarded for growth, repeat purchasing, market expansion, convenience, shelf life, and products that people will consume frequently.
Those incentives can favor the widespread production, marketing, and distribution of highly profitable foods and drinks that contribute to unhealthy dietary patterns. The company that gets progressively better at selling more food tends to outperform the company that gets progressively worse at it.
Then follow them downstream
Pharmaceutical, device, insurance, and healthcare businesses can earn continuing revenue from screening, monitoring, medication, and long-term disease management.
The same economic system can therefore profit twice: first from products and environments that increase disease risk, and then from managing the resulting disease.
Type 2 diabetes happens to individuals. The epidemic is produced by a system.
No conspiracy is necessary
This insight concerns corporations as structures rather than corporate employees as villains. Each organization need only respond rationally to the incentives immediately in front of it.
Executives who repeatedly sacrifice growth and returns for diffuse future public-health benefits may lose authority to people who deliver the financial results the system rewards. Over time, the structure selects decisions and leaders that keep profitable products growing, even when the combined population-level consequences are harmful.
Personal responsibility and structural causation can coexist
This argument does not eliminate personal agency or imply that individual behavior is irrelevant. It distinguishes the immediate causes visible in a person from the system that shapes the choices, defaults, prices, advertising, availability, and repeated exposures surrounding millions of people.
Personal responsibility and structural causation can both be real at the same time.
Tim Barrie · Diabetes Is Profitable
Where this insight comes from
Tim developed this concise formulation while building Diabetes Is Profitable, an evidence-led investigation into why type 2 diabetes became epidemic and why the system keeps reproducing the conditions that make it so prevalent.
The research supports important links between corporate incentives, unhealthy commodity markets, food environments, dietary risk, and commercial markets for diabetes treatment. Identifying those links as one connected incentive system—and describing that system as the root cause of the epidemic—is the investigation’s reasoned synthesis rather than the direct finding of one study.
Diabetes Is ProfitableThe complete investigationEvidence and methodologyRelated researchThe root-cause questionHow corporate selection works