At first John Dodson wasn’t a good diabetes patient, he says. For the first 10 years after he learned that he had type 2 diabetes in 1985, he thought that managing his diabetes was up to his doctor.

“I tried to do what he said, but of course I failed,” he told me. “My blood sugar was generally between 150 and 250, so I had an awfully hard time.”

The doctor that he saw at that time was a general practitioner. That doctor prescribed the only oral drug we had at that time for diabetes, one of the a sulfonylureas called glyburide. Later he switched to an endocrinologist, who gave John an unpleasant wake-up call.

“That doctor told me that there was nothing he could do for me and that after five years I would be on dialysis,” John recalls. “I walked out of that office thinking that this is not going to be my future.”

So he switched right away to another endocrinologist, Dr. Joe Prendergast. He is one of this country’s leading endocrinologists and a pioneer in many areas. I have known him since 1999 when I wrote about his telemedicine practice in an article that I wrote for the American Diabetes Association’s website.

“The very day that I saw Dr. Joe,” John remembers, “he said, John, I think I’ve got something that will help you.” That was in June 2005. A diabetes medication in a new class of drugs called GLP-1 agonists, Byetta (exenatide), had just become available. John became the first person in the county to take Byetta.

John Dodson near Moss Landing, California,  in February 2008

Byetta was what connected John and me. We started corresponding in early 2006 when he wrote me about my about my post here, “Stalking Byetta.” His encouragement for me to start taking Byetta even if I couldn’t work out my insurance coverage did a lot to get me started a few days later. Since that time John became my role model and ultimately my best friend, and we have visited each other often.

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Paula Deen’s critics have it wrong. Everybody is jumping all over this poor celebrity chef now that she says that she has diabetes.

Poor Paula has grown rich and famous by parleying her home-style cooking into a food empire. Newly divorced and with her last $200 she started a catering service in 1989. In 1996 that became her first restaurant in Savannah, Georgia, and that in turn led to television. Since 1999 she has hosted several Food Network shows. Four cookbooks, featuring traditional Southern recipes, and her memoir, It Ain’t All About the Cookin’, followed.

The Chef at Work

Paula was once cash poor. But now that she has money and fame, everybody is poor-mouthing her cooking.

The experts just don’t like Southern comfort food the way poor Paula cooks it. They don’t like the high amounts of “fat, salt, and sugar” in her recipes. Note the emphasis on fat.

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South Korea is different from the United States.

In some important respects this Asian country is more like America than most of us would think. This country is a democracy with a booming economy.

But the differences are great and go beyond Korea’s use of a different language and even a different alphabet than Westerners use. The differences go far beyond history and tradition. The biggest differences that I have seen during my visit this month are in the people themselves.

I saw with my own eyes how thin almost all Koreans are. Coming from the United States — even though I live in the thinnest state — I have been amazed to see almost no obesity here.

So, of course, I expected that almost no one in Korea would have diabetes. After all, didn’t the American weight problem lead to the rapid rise of diabetes in our country?

We know that some sort of link between being overweight and having diabetes exists. We do know that being overweight doesn’t cause diabetes, because two-thirds of American are overweight and about one-tenth of us have diabetes. But as our weight has gone up so too has the proportion of people with diabetes. Those two conditions have to have some association. [Read more →]

At the end of my five-week vacation on the South Island of New Zealand I am returning to the reality of my everyday life with diabetes. For me, reality means controlling my blood glucose level with diet and exercise. Since 2007 I haven’t had to use any diabetes medications to keep good control.

But, like all of us, I do have to watch my diet and exercise. And like most people on vacation my attention sometimes wandered.

While I have diligently following a very low-carb diet since 2007, I readily admit that I enjoyed a few servings of potatoes in New Zealand. Worse, I ate two slices of toast. While I have broken my addiction to all types and forms of grain, the toast in eggs benedict was sometimes impossible for me to ignore.

On the other hand, I ate more seafood than ever before in my life. Seafood is our best source of heart-healthy omega-3 fats. I ate everything from the well-known salmon, prawns, shrimp, oysters, and calamari to butterfish, groper, smooth dory, gurnard, ling, monkfish, and blue cod and on to fish I never heard of before — warehou, tarakihi, whitebait, bluenose, trumpeter, and green shell mussels. They all tasted wonderful to me while at the same time helping to balance out my dietary lapses.

Wild game also has a better ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 fats. That helped me to feel virtuous while enjoying a venison cassarole that a ranger on the Milford Track prepared for my lunch. I wrote about this and my other New Zealand adventures on my “Fitness and Photography for Fun ” blog.

Normally, I minimize the amount of fructose that I eat, since it’s so hard on the liver. I do eat some berries when I am at home. The berries that I especially enjoyed in New Zealand are called kiwiberries, miniature (grape-sized) versions of the kiwi fruit we have in America. But kiwiberries are especially sweet and juicy.

New Zealand is rightfully famous for its dairy products. I don’t think that the country has any of the infamous concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where we tightly pen our lifestock and chickens and feed them a grain diet, which in turn worsens our omega-3 to omega-6 ratio.

New Zealand dairy products are therefore not only healthier than most of ours but also taste better. I particularly enjoyed their cheese and their “Fresh’n Fruity” brand of natural (no fruit) Greek style yoghurt (as they spell it).

The other major deviation from my diet besides some additional carbohydrates was going back on coffee after almost a year without. I stopped drinking coffee because it was giving me awful headaches. But I can handle one cup a day now. I make sure that it’s a good cup, which the Kiwis do know how to make. In all the better restaurants I can find excellent coffee that is somewhat diluted espresso that for some reason the Kiwis call a “long black.”

In contrast to my somewhat slacker dietary habits on vacation I have been walking and hiking more than usual. I convinced myself that I need the extra calories to give me strength on the trail. I’m hoping that it has been a wash.

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.

This week’s convention of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists in Houston is winding down this afternoon. The Health Central Network sent me here to report on it.

About 1350 endocrinologists and related health professionals are here along with 88 companies exhibiting their products. The doctors presented 170 posters and 200 abstracts.

Now that I’ve gone to the meetings that I needed to attend and talked with the doctors I needed to interview, I’ve got time to start writing about them. In the next few days you can expect several articles that I am developing out of my interviews at the convention and separately with a company headquartered in Houston.
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The annual convention of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists — those medical specialists who treat diabetes — is underway in Houston. I’m covering the event for The Health Central Network.

The convention took over the George R. Brown Convention Center in the downtown of America’s fourth largest city. The convention center is so big that after Hurricane Katrina 7,000 refugees lived here.

In the mob of today’s convention you might imagine my surprise that the first person I made eye contact with asked if I was David Mendosa. The person who asked was Sarah Senn, who I had sent several photos for an article that she wrote about me. But we had never previously met in person.
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Diabetes bloggers are playing tag. My friend Bill Quick, who has the Diabetes.Blog.Com and the Diabetes Monitor website, tagged me after Amy Tenderich of Diabetes Mine had tagged him. [Read more →]

Frederick Banting was a small-town Canadian doctor in the early 1920s. He was just starting out in practice and didn’t even have enough patients to afford to get married. [Read more →]