The latest numbers on the diabetes epidemic are alarming, but hardly surprising.

The World Health Organization reported Wednesday that type 2 diabetes cases have mushroomed globally since 1980.

The U.N. health agency says sedentary lifestyles, obesity, aging and population growth drove a nearly fourfold increase in worldwide cases of diabetes over the last quarter-century, affecting 422 million people in 2014.

WHO reported that 8.5 percent of the world population had type 2 diabetes in 2014, up from 108 million, or 4.7 percent, in 1980.

Releasing the report at a news conference in Geneva, Switzerland, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said: “We need to rethink our daily lives: to eat healthily, be physically active and avoid excessive weight gain.”

That’s not likely to happen anytime soon. The consumer-driven American lifestyle is globalizing, and the diabetes epidemic is expanding right along with it.

Type 2, or adult onset diabetes — the body’s decreasing ability to produce insulin and turn blood sugar into energy — has been aptly labeled a disease of our own excesses. It has long been linked to diets rich in processed carbohydrates and sugary drinks, obesity and lack of exercise. Populations in emerging countries, particularly in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, are experiencing sharp increases in diabetes rates as their cultures adopt Western foods and conveniences.

Type 1 diabetes, or childhood diabetes, is not the same as type 2 diabetes. A type 1 diabetes patient’s pancreas doesn’t make insulin.

Regrettably, the biggest obstacle to curing diabetes is the sheer size of growing diabetes patient market. Diabetes is treated with a regimen of daily pills and injections designed to control blood sugar levels, which are monitored with glucose strips and meters. Treatment costs $85,000 during an average diabetic’s lifetime.

Multiplied by the 422 million worldwide cases, and you have a $35.87 trillion pharmaceutical empire.

This cash pile is staggering in its immensity, but it goes largely unnoticed because we never see it. It’s disguised, or at least made abstract, paid out as insurance premiums or Medicaid payments. We’re lulled into believing the co-pay we’re billed at the pharmacy is the actual price of the drugs we buy when the true price could be hundreds or even thousands of dollars more.

Our collective nearsightedness over the cost of diabetes treatment is slowing our response — particularly when remedies exist that cost far less than the medical treatments.

WHO recommends we consume less sugary food and exercise more. The remedy seems remarkably simple. But if it were that simple, we wouldn’t have a growing epidemic with no end in sight.

How do you force insulin on a cell that’s resistant to it? How do you change habits when consumers don’t really want to change?

Maybe WHO should come up with an answer for that. Meantime, it wouldn’t hurt for policymakers to put more focus on that $35.87 trillion price tag.