I generally agree. It's all interconnected, and we could point to a singular cause, but to treat them all as one and of the same class of disease seems reductive and not useful.

Though, to be play devil's advocate for a second, it does seem that diabetes is typically where the symptoms start, and we do understand that diabetes is fundamentally metabolic and/or functional dysfunction in 1 or more of 7-ish different areas.

I think it's the level of perspective zoom + timing we take that makes the article's assertion either useful or not.

If we zoom out, while catching disease early on, and we address the metabolic conditions via lifestyle and/or certain drugs like GLP1, then we prevent the need to intervene on the kidney and cardiac front.

But if we zoom in to a specific issue, after disease has progressed a profound amount, a GLP1 intervention may be too little, too late.

Hopefully though, this may help the messaging to folks that if they are contending with metabolic disease that presents as diabetes, introducing lifestyle and pharma interventions early may be helpful on the larger epidemiological front.