Guys named Ed probably don’t feel honored to have one of the most devastating complications of diabetes named after then. But erectile dysfunction — or just ED for short — is both personally ego-destroying and all too common. At least they don’t say nowadays that ED is the same as impotence.

[Read more →]

We knew that the trouble with fructose is how hard it hits our the liver and how much it raises our triglyceride levels, which increases our risks for heart attacks. High-fructose diets also lead us to secrete more insulin, which in turn leads to more insulin resistance.

[Read more →]

More and more of what I read about diabetes implicates inflammation. So when Dr. Michael Jaff told me about its role in peripheral arterial disease (PAD) I took the opportunity to delve into what he could tell me about both inflammation and PAD.
[Read more →]

Since I knew almost nothing about peripheral arterial disease (PAD), I jumped at the chance to talk with Dr. Michael Jaff a few days ago. He is the medical director of the Vascular Diagnostic Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital and a specialist in treating PAD.
[Read more →]

If you can see this article, you personally don’t need the new meter I’m writing about here. But you may well have a family member or a friend with diabetes who doesn’t see very well, if at all.

[Read more →]

The new WaveSense Jazz meter is by far the best blood glucose meter I’ve ever used.

For years I have complained about the lack of accuracy of other meters. All the other meters also make it too difficult to tag our results to correspond with our meals, and most other meters still require that we code them to match a new vial of test strips. This new meter even includes two ways to calculate glycemic variability, which many people see as even more valuable than the A1C test. And much more.
[Read more →]

Yogurt is one of the few probiotic foods that Americans regularly eat. When we get enough probiotics — friendly bacteria that help to drive out their bad counterparts and some yeasts — we get a health benefit, according to a definition of the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations cited by the U.S. Government’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
[Read more →]

Starting to exercise isn’t easy for anyone. It sure wasn’t for me, even though I knew all too well how important exercise is for controlling my diabetes.

It’s a particularly personal example of the universal problem called inertia, which Sir Isaac Newton told us about 321 years ago in the greatest single scientific work ever. Inertia means that a body at rest tends to remain at rest.

[Read more →]