Middle-aged adults with diabetes die an estimated six years before those without diabetes, says a new study in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.

The reason I'm so concerned about this finding is that diabetes almost inevitably follows on from obesity, and as numbers of obese people rocket, it means we're going to be seeing people living shorter lives and dying from an array of illnesses.

This research is very relevant because it examined nearly a million people. Study leaders found a link between diabetes and an increased risk of death from a frighteningly wide range of diseases.

One of the illness groups was multiple cancers, another was digestive diseases and surprisingly, the third group showed that diabetes sufferers have more injuries and self-harm more than those without it.

The study also confirmed the well known link between diabetes and heart attacks, stokes and infections.

But most shocking of all is that the diabetics mainly had type 2 diabetes - the kind that develops when we become obese. If this isn't a wake-up call for us all to pay more attention to diet, exercise, our lifestyles and the way we feed our children, I don't know what is.

Many risk factors that we traditionally associate with early death, like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking and drinking, did not have nearly the same effect as diabetes.

Risk of death went up in line with blood sugar levels in people with and without diabetes.

The damage is done by persistent high levels of blood sugar, which seep into the tissues and affect the whole body's metabolism, something it can't cope with for very long.

Women are particularly vulnerable - they lost almost seven years to diabetes at the age of 40.

The message is: you can't procrastinate in correcting obesity problems. They require immediate attention because these newly discovered, devastating effects of the condition simply cannot be ignored.

If we go on at this rate our overstretched NHS will end up looking after the side effects of obesity and little else.