Raise your right hand if you don’t take any herbal supplements.

Gee, I don’t see any hands, and I probably wouldn’t see more than a handful if you were here with me literally instead of virtually.

People with diabetes probably take more supplements than other people. About 36 percent of American adults use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), much of it in the form of supplements. We spend $20 billion a year for supplements.

Aside from the drain on our bank accounts, we don’t have any good proof that any supplements work. None of them.

[Read more →]

Low-carb advocates are already jumping all over the American Diabetes Association for the new “Nutrition Recommendations” that the organization published yesterday. That policy statement, published in a supplement to the January 2008 issue of Diabetes Care, provides only limited endorsement of a low-carb diet. It’s good only for weight loss and only effective for up to a year, they maintain. [Read more →]

Ever since I discovered the glycemic index a dozen years ago, I thought that I knew that anything we eat or drink has to have calories for it to raise our blood glucose levels. In fact, those calories have to come from carbohydrates – not protein or fat – to give those levels much of a spike.

Now, however, new studies have found a strange and disturbing exception to the rule. [Read more →]

A few days ago I was talking with my friend Derek Paice. Derek and I have known each other for years, and seven years ago I profiled his success in dominating diabetes in an article for the “Diabetes Watch” website that is now on my site. [Read more →]

All the real diet books say to start with a food diary. For the 85 percent of those of us with diabetes who are overweight or obese and are presumably trying to get down to something more healthy that sounds easy enough. [Read more →]

You might think that everyone who has diabetes would know about a seed that is superior to other plant and marine sources of essential omega-3 oils. It is also high in antioxidants and fiber. Besides that, it is high in protein and lipids, is low in sodium, and has fewer net carbs than most other grains. [Read more →]

One of our most stubborn challenges is to control the dawn phenomenon. That’s when our fasting blood glucose readings in the morning are higher than when we went to bed. [Read more →]

Almost everything that we thought we knew about fat is wrong.

The “really bad fats,” according to Barry Sears of The Zone fame, are saturated fats, trans fats, and arachidonic acid. He says that the polyunsaturated fat known as arachidonic acid “may be the most dangerous fat known when consumed in excess.” [Read more →]

The conventional wisdom of our health professionals is that a calorie is a calorie. “From a purely thermodynamic point of view, this is clear because the human body or, indeed, any living organism cannot create or destroy energy but can only convert energy from one form to another.” [Read more →]

They know a thing or two about pasta in Italy. And now an Italian company is poised to enter the American market with pasta for people with diabetes. [Read more →]