When we reached our 20s after several years of marriage, we decided we would embark on home ownership, using the small amount of money we had been able to accumulate through savings, and we found a place we could afford, a small, basic semi-detached bungalow in the far suburbs of Toronto, which the owner sold to us for $14,000. We struggled to afford the first and second mortgage payments and taxes which amounted to less than $100 monthly.

Several years later our children began arriving; three, one after the other in a three-year-period. It was a real effort in financial management to ensure that we all had fresh fruits and vegetables in our diet. The house had been built with a small box at the side door with doors that opened both on the exterior and interior of the building; a box where I could leave notice for the daily milk delivery of how much milk, butter, eggs, cottage cheese or sour cream I might require. The cash in coinage to pay for the deliveries would be left in the box along with the note, sometimes not, and I would be given credit until such time as I was able to pay the amount owing.

Now, supermarket shelves burst with colourful displays of fruits and vegetables from all over the world of types that had never been seen back then when our world was young and so were we. An influx of immigrants from all over the world bringing with them their cuisine and familiarity with exotic agricultural products also widened our sphere of whole foods' potentials for the dinner table.

That has gone in lock-step with large food processing corporations loading down those same supermarket shelves and freezer compartments with highly processed foods bearing scant resemblance to the whole foods we had always been familiar with. Ironically, just as greater choices of various types of fresh foods have become available to shoppers, so have the selections of pre-processed, pre-prepared foods posing as nutritious alternatives to home-prepared meals.

In a busy, distracted world where lifestyles have changed beyond recognition from the time when I was a stay-at-home mother for our three young children and my hsuband's meagre salary was stretched impossibly in the hopes we could provide the necessities of life, the simple art of basic food preparation has become a mystery and a nuisance to too many people.

Children are no longer introduced to basic, nutritional foods, but are given highly salted, sugared, fat-laden quasi-food products to sustain their physical needs as they grow into adulthood. And they perpetuate the cycle with their own children; using the convenience of take-out foods or supermarket-accessed pre-ready meals to accelerate the work of providing nutrition on a daily basis.

The result is an explosion of life-style diseases, preventable chronic conditions, conditions that could be reversed, but most often are not, because it is simply too inconvenient, requiring a total lifestyle change. That lifestyle change from a basic living pattern to a more modern one where people of middle-age who were sedentary and inclined to over-indulge at the dinner table, led to over-40s being diagnosed with Type 2, Adult-onset diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes is a chronic condition that must be managed carefully in an attempt to ensure that life can be prolonged with some quality, rather than succumbing to all the dire and worsening health conditions that result from ill management of the disease. It is an entirely different condition in a sense from Type 1 diabetes that used to be called Juvenile-onset; Type 2 is preventable, Type 1 is not.

Type 1 diabetes represents a still-mysterious failure of the endocrine system. It results from an auto-immune failure, when the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas have been morbidly compromised and they become incapable of any longer producing insulin. Insulin production is required for normal body function; it enables body cells to use the glucose circulating in the bloodstream as a by-product of food consumption to produce energy. Without that sustaining capacity the human organism begins to shut down, after desperately attempting to cope with the failure on its own.

Typically it is young children and teens who become afflicted through nothing they have done, but because of a genetic inheritance, an auto-immune collapse, or both. And they become dependent throughout the course of their lifetime to taking multiple daily doses of long- and short-acting insulin, based on the results of their continual blood-sugar tests taken through the day, to balance food intake, energy output and medicating themselves with insulin injections. Without this careful protocol, they will die.

And now, health authorities clamour to get out the message that growing numbers of children are being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, a condition requiring a careful balance of food, medication and activity, but which could be reversed through that same formula, absent the medication.

What is true for mature adults with Adult-onset diabetes is true for children acquiring the condition; a shortened lifespan, a compromised condition of health due to cardiovascular and neuropathic conditions that may result in heart attacks, strokes, impaired sight, amputation of limbs and kidney failure.

That's a fairly steep price to pay for the convenience of never having to exercise oneself through walking to a destination, or having to tediously prepare meals using basic nutritional foodstuffs.