When the captain of the skiff who took me snorkeling off South Water Caye, an island of Belize in the Caribbean Sea on Thanksgiving Day, told me about the benefits to people with diabetes of a local fruit, I listened. While I was theoretically on vacation, I always think about my diabetes and how I can help other people who have this disease.

The captain, Ismael Usher, said that his grandmother had diabetes and managed it by drinking the juice of the noni tree. After we got back to the island, he picked a noni fruit from a tree there and gave it to me.

I Study the Fruit of the Noni Tree after Snorkeling
Noni was new to me, so I ate it. It didn’t taste good. But I expected that after trying several other traditional remedies, like bitter melon and gymnema sylvestra.

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Endurance athletes and hot yoga enthusiasts are hardly the only people who have to stay hydrated. Anyone who has a sweaty job needs to make sure to replenish the minerals lost at work. People like me who have diabetes need to be especially careful to stay in balance.

Even if you aren’t much of an athlete or work in a hot and humid place you can perspire a lot when you go to the tropics. I know from my current experience.

Right now I am writing from Caye Caulker, a tiny island in the Caribbean Sea off the mainland of the Central American country of Belize. I am here primarily to photograph birds, and that requires lots of hiking. The weather has stayed mostly at 80° hot and 95-100 percent humid.

To  stay hydrated I don’t just consume a lot of salt. That can help in an emergency. When I was a kid in high school, I had a summer job washing bottles in a dairy at the western edge of the Colorado desert. When I collapsed after a few days, my parents took me to our family doctor, who prescribed salt tablets. While I was able to go right back to work, this wasn’t an ideal solution.

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Those of us who have diabetes know that it takes about a quarter of an hour for us to digest our food after we eat, so we don’t feel full until then. The basic idea is to wait a little while before we grab seconds.

This is especially important at this holiday season of celebration and overeating and when our meal includes even a little carbohydrate. That’s because eating carbs can actually make us hungry. This counterintuitive reaction is something that I have written about at HealthCentral.com in my article, “How Eating Can Make You Hungry” at http://www.healthcentral.com/diabetes/c/17/18362/eating-make-hungry

But waiting “a little while” is not precise enough. Most of us have a hard time gauging the passage of time. Others can’t stop checking the clock when they are thinking about eating.

My idea is to time the wait with my kitchen timer.

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When I started to read Wheat Belly by Dr. William Davis, my first thought was that it didn’t go far enough. The book’s main message is to avoid wheat and we will be much healthier. Not only will we lose weight, but we will also be able to manage our diabetes much better.

But just wheat? Not all grains, which the paleo diet eliminates? Not starches, the enemy of low-carb?

No Wheat!

When I began to follow a very low-carb diet after reading Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution by Dr. Richard K. Bernstein and Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, I eliminated almost all starch from my diet.

Almost all. Eventually, I did eliminate all wheat, but not until I had followed a very low-carb diet for several years.

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Every month when I send out my “Diabetes Update” newsletter to about 20,000 subscribers it includes a section on Dr. Bernstein’s webcast. That’s because Dr. Richard K. Bernstein’s monthly webcast is one of the best resources we have to help us manage our diabetes.

The webcasts are live seminars with Dr. Bernstein answering questions from readers of his books and others of us who have diabetes. They are usually on the last Wednesday of each month starting at 7pm CST.

But we can’t always connect at that time. I know that I have missed many because of my travels.

I’m also one of those people who find audio to be a relatively inefficient way to impart knowledge. I find it a lot quicker to learn something that I read.

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The future of blood glucose software will arrive in less than two weeks. I have seen the future and it works.

Until now, all the computer programs for logging our blood glucose numbers were incomplete. Still, for the past 15 years I have tried to include all those programs in my directory of Diabetes Management Software.

The biggest lack is their general inability to automatically upload the blood glucose readings from our meters. Except for a few proprietary and often expensive programs that work only with one meter, we have had to manually enter our numbers.

No more.

The future is Glooko, and it works with six of the leading meters from three of the four meter market leaders. It works with LifeScan’s OneTouch UltraMini, OneTouch Ultra2, and OneTouch UltraLink; with Bayer’s Contour; and with Abbott’s FreeStyle Freedom Lite and FreeStyle Lite.

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“A sound mind in a sound body,” was something my father regularly emphasized to me. My father and I understood that this Latin aphorism, originally “Mens sana in corpore sano,” means that only a healthy body can produce or sustain a healthy mind.

Many years later I still think what my father taught me is true. Like many people who manage their diabetes, I now have both a healthy body and a healthy mind.

Before I learned in 1994 that I have diabetes, I paid little attention to my health. I learned the hard way that I have to get off my butt and outside for the exercise that we all need. After my wake-up call, I took control of what I ate, turned away from the Standard American Diet, and lost a lot of weight.

One result is that I am happier and have a better memory than ever. Even though I recently celebrated my 76th birthday, my mind seems to function as well as it did years ago, if not better.

But we can also understand “A sound mind in a sound body” the other way around. Only a healthy mind can produce a healthy body.

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People with diabetes know that carbohydrates will raise our blood glucose levels. But we think that one form of carbohydrates — fiber — is benign.

It isn’t.

Dr. Robert C. Atkins was a pioneer in seeing the benefits of a very low-carb diet in his books like his 1972 bestseller, Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution. But the organization that he left behind, Atkins Nutritionals, sells all sorts of goodies packed with what it calls “Net Carbs.” They say that we don’t need to count the amount of fiber you eat:

“When you follow the Atkins Diet, aka the Atkins Nutrition Approach, you actually count grams of Net Carbs, which represent the total carbohydrate content of the food minus the fiber content. The Net Carbs number reflects the grams of carbohydrate that significantly impact your blood sugar level and therefore are the only carbs you need to count when you do Atkins.”

But fiber does count. Depending on the source and type of fiber that it is, each gram of fiber provides us about 2 calories, which is about half the amount that non-fiber carbohydrates provides.

This is what the best source, the Institute of Medicine, indicates. This group and its parent organization, the National Academy of Sciences, are hybrid governmental-private organizations. The U.S. government created these private organizations to advise it on scientific and technological matters. “While it is still unclear as to the energy yield of fibers in humans, current data indicate that the yield is in the range of 1.5 to 2.5 kcal/g,” the IOM says.

Still, the members of my Very Low Carb for Health Diabetes Support Group in Boulder, Colorado, wanted to check for ourselves. Chris Quemena at Quest Nutrition Inc. sent me a case of 12 Peanut Butter Supreme Quest Bars for us to test.

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Most people think that the big advantage of being able to test their Coumadin levels at home would be the convenience of not having to get tested at a clinic every month. But in fact the big advantage is the more information and therefore greater control you would get from weekly testing at home.

Few people are getting those levels tested at home yet. Before my wife died four and one-half years ago we tried in vain to get medical insurance coverage for that home testing. She had had to take Coumadin for atrial fibrillation, which was probably one of the complications that she had from her diabetes.

Medicare started covering home testing for people who had mechanical heart valves in 2001. But it wasn’t until 2008, a year after Catherine died, that they started covering that testing for chronic atrial fibrillation and deep vein thrombosis.

If you have Medicare the cost is minimal. Medicare covers 80 percent of the cost, and if you have a secondary supplement, it picks up the rest, $26 per month.

The cost is for renting the testing device and buying the test strips. For the weekly testing you need four test strips per month, but you get two extras to use if you have a problem with them.

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When Dr. Bob Sallis called me, he was standing in line at an airport. I was sitting down.

My mistake.

We had scheduled an interview for this article about walking. But the message that he wanted to get out was both about walking and sitting.

“Some of the recent studies are showing that if you sit the rest of the day after exercise you negate the benefits of your exercise,” Dr. Sallis told me. “You have to be conscious of too much sitting.”

One of my wives once told me, only half in jest, that she never stands when she could sit and never sits when she could lie down. That’s only a slight exaggeration of what most of us have become.

I used to sit as much as my late wife did. But last year when I learned that “Standing Helps Heart Health,” I finally got my act together. Soon, I got a desk where I can work standing up.

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