We all know that type 2 diabetes can be caused by poor diet, lack of exercise and many other lifestyle choices that we personally make.

But there is one lifestyle choice that people around you make that has now been proven to drastically contribute to your type 2 diabetes.

If someone around you is doing this, ask them to stop, because it’s frankly killing you!

A scientific literature review appeared in the September 2015 edition of the Lancet concluded that 11.7 percent of cases of type 2 diabetes in men and 2.4 percent in women were probably caused by active smoking. This makes for a total of around 27.8 million people in the world who developed diabetes after smoking. The review covered 88 studies with around six million participants, and is one of the largest of its type published up to now.

The authors concluded that active smokers who smoked an average amount had a 37 percent higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, and that even those who had quit were still at greater risk than those who had never smoked. After five years of refraining, former smokers dropped their risk to 18 percent, which dropped even further to 11 percent after ten years. This is still 11 percent higher than the risk of people who never started the habit.

Just in case you thought that this was not relevant to your life, passive smokers are at serious risk too. According to this review, if you inhale a moderate amount of someone else’s smoke, you have a 34 percent type 2 diabetes risk.

Shockingly, then, a moderate amount of secondhand smoke carries almost the same risk as a moderate amount of first-hand smoke.

This is not the worst of it. If you spend a lot of time around a heavy smoker, your chance of developing diabetes increases by an incredible 57 percent, which is the same increase experienced by heavy first-hand smokers.

The researchers warned that the literature they collected could not be used to test whether smoking actually caused diabetes, but they assumed that this was most probably the case.

This study is important for several reasons.

• If secondhand smoke can increase our chance to pick up type 2 diabetes with all its accompanying health costs, no government can truly claim that it should remain outside the debate about smoke-free zones. This kind of thinking has, in fact, persuaded many governments to ban smoking in public spaces, and has even encouraged some to ban smoking in vehicles with passengers, even though those are essentially private spaces.

• People who are hesitant about quitting the smoking habit because they are afraid of putting on weight should think again. Diabetes may not only make you put on weight, but it may make you quite seriously sick. The far superior approach is to stop smoking and go to the gym twice or three times a week to fight off the weight.

• People who think they would start smoking and continue only until their middle age have a pretty poor plan, as the negative consequences of smoking during their younger years are permanent. But quitting is, of course, much better than to keep going.

At this stage the exact mechanism through which smoking increases your type 2 diabetes risk is not well understood.

Many experts seem to believe that smoking increases chronic low-level inflammation and arterial dysfunction, both risk factors for diabetes. They therefore argue that smoking is probably one of the causes of diabetes.

But smoking is just a small fraction of overall causes of type 2 diabetes, here is the exact 3-step strategy that thousands of readers have used to completely eliminate their type 2 diabetes…