It turns out that when you “Walk to Fight Diabetes,” at least in Tucson anyway, that you’re actually walking off the calories the American Diabetes Association has loaded on you at the event in the form of a free lunch. And money earned probably won’t go toward a diabetes cure—because they don’t believe in one.

Our Facebook friend Wayne Sumstine shared his shock today after attending the event:

I fell through the looking glass today into the upside down, backwards world of the American Diabetes Association’s “Walk to Fight Diabetes.” The free lunch served to thousands consisted of hamburgers, hot dogs, potato chips, doritos, …and soda.”

When Wayne asked the chief organizer whether “serving foods that cause diabetes was the best educational tool for people there to learn how to prevent and cure it” the organizer replied that “popular” food is what brought the people to the event. He added that though diabetes is treatable, “it’s not curable.”

Wayne happened to have a copy of Dr. Gabriel Cousens’ book “There Is a Cure for Diabetes: The Tree of Life 21-Day+ Program” with him—which proposes that a raw foods diet can eliminate type 1 diabetes—and asked him if he’d read it. The organizer had not, but was sure it was extreme and unworkable for most people. Wayne wondered on his Facebook profile “whether a truly effective approach is as extreme as facing blindness, amputation, morbidity and death.”

The sad thing is that organizer is making a decision for thousands of people. At least put the choices out there so people know what is possible. Let them make the decision whether it’s too difficult to commit to. When I first was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease at age 19, I read about the Specific Carbohydrate Diet as outlined by Elaine Gottschall in her book Breaking the Vicious Cycle: Intestinal Health through Diet. At the time, the diet seemed too extreme for me. Years later, at age 36, I chose to follow the diet and experienced many unexpected health gains. Having known about the diet for years, I was finally ready to give it a chance when my condition became severe enough. And yet national Crohn’s Disease organizations still refuse to discuss diet with their members and prefer to recommend powerful medications with unknown long-term side effects.

Hopefully groups like these and the American Diabetes Association will start walking their talk and serving organic whole foods fare at their events. It would also be nice to see Cancer foundations encouraging members to forego carcinogenic personal care products by holding fragrance free events. People need role models, they need guidance and instruction, and they need to see the alternatives to what is accepted as status quo. That is how change will come about the quickest.