If diabetes has an up side, one good thing about the huge number of people who have it is that we make an attractive market for people who want to sell to us. Nowhere is this more clear than in the many blood glucose meters that companies offer us.
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Three guys started some of the first diabetes websites at the dawn of the Internet age in 1995. My site, Mendosa.com, came first. But quite soon Dr. Bill Quick started his site, DiabetesMonitor.com, and Jeff Hitchcock started ChildrenWithDiabetes.com.
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My breakfast this morning was two strips of bacon, two eggs, and coffee. This is pretty much the American standard, except that I left out the usual toast, jelly, and hash browns that would have given me more carbohydrates than I wanted. Of course, I added a little salt and hot sauce to my eggs as well as some fresh herbs and a lot of chia seeds.
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One of the most interesting and important professional journals will publish a head-to-head comparison of major blood glucose meters in its forthcoming April 2008 issue. The article in Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics compares Abbott Diabetes Care’s FreeStyle Flash, Roche’s Accu-Chek Advantage and Accu-Chek Compact Plus, and Bayer HealthCare’s Contour.

The article also includes BD Diabetes Care’s BD Logic meter, which the company no longer makes. But it fails to include perhaps the most accurate meter, the WaveSense KeyNote, made by AgaMatrix, one of the smaller companies in this business. Also omitted are any meters from one of the biggest meter companies, LifeScan.

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People with diabetes are like everyone else, only more so. This realization has been slowly growing in my mind as I began to appreciate that while we talk all the time about how those of us with diabetes need regular exercise, good nutrition, and weight control, everyone needs that too.
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As soon as I read the new study by Dr. James Levine, I was inspired to go right out for a four-mile two-hour walk over to the University of New Mexico campus. I’m in Albuquerque this week, where I am visiting my favorite Certified Diabetes Educator, Karen LaVine.
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“We live in a culture of low targets,” writes Hana, one of my regular correspondents in England who has diabetes. For example, her nurse told her that that walking for half an hour three times a week was enough exercise to make a difference, and it doesn’t have to be fast walking. “I do a lot more than that,” she says.
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All of us can use a little help in managing the complexities of our diabetes. The very young and the very old sometimes need a lot.

Do you need to make sure that your child or parent has his or her blood glucose under control? Short of hovering over them all the time, you can ask them to send their test results to you or their doctor.
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We all know that diabetes is a risk factor for heart disease, and we do our best not to collect any more of these factors. Of course, it’s better not to take any other risks with our hearts. But what’s worse, to be fat or to be unfit?
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