Our mouths are key to diabetes control. And not just what we put in them.

How would you like to reduce your A1C level by 0.67 percent — like from 6.67 to 6.0 — without putting less in your mouth or even increasing your exercise? This third type of A1C control may be the easiest ever.

Research presented at last month’s Scientific Sessions of the American Diabetes Association that I attended in San Francisco made this point. Dr. George Taylor, associate professor of dentistry at the University of Michigan, reported there on recent studies demonstrating the association between periodontal problems and the complications of diabetes. He spoke in the first symposium ever by dentists to ADA meetings.

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This week I ate out at my favorite Nepalese restaurant for lunch with a friend. I went through the buffet line only once, which insured that I didn’t gain weight.

But I did have some food that was rather high in carbohydrates, including a samosa. And I enjoyed a couple of other yummy high-carb items.

“Aren’t you cheating on your low-carb diet?” asked my friend.

I bridled at his remark. Cheating is dishonest. It’s a word best reserved to its usual sense of copying the work of others.
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When I made a preliminary report here on William Haskell’s presentation on exercise last month, I missed the main point. This Stanford University professor of medicine spoke at the first day of the American Diabetes Association’s scientific sessions in San Francisco.

This was one of the talks that I most wanted to hear. Exercise along with diet are the best tools we have to control our diabetes.

But my plane was late, and I missed most of what he had to say. In fact, most people who wanted to hear him speak couldn’t get into the full conference room.
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Today the country’s leading medical journal published the first long-term comparison of the top three weight loss diets. And the winner is:

low-carb.

The study in The New England Journal of Medicine is also free on-line and is well worth reading. It compares weight loss on low-carbohydrate, Mediterranean, and low-fat diets.

In this two-year trial the researchers randomly assigned 322 moderately obese participants to these three diets. Those assigned to the low-carb diet weren’t restricted to how much they ate. But those on the Mediterranean and low-fat diets were.

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Except for cruise ships, buffets are the worst for our weight. The cruises that I’ve taken have been essentially round-the-clocks feasts.

The all-you-can-eat buffets don’t seem as bad as going on a cruise. After all, each buffet is just one meal. But the urge to gorge seems to come naturally when we know that we only have one chance to fill er up with the multitude of delicacies in the serving line.

Whether it’s a cruise ship or a buffet restaurant, we are sure to gain weight. I know.
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If you want to lose weight, doing something as simple as recording what you eat might make the biggest difference. Writing down what you eat can double your weight loss, according to a study that the American Journal of Preventative Medicine will publish next month.

This finding comes from an analysis of the first phase of one of the largest weight loss maintenance trials every conducted. After about six months, the nearly 1,700 participants lost an average of 13 pounds.

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One of the biggest and most important diabetes trials is well underway. But so far it hasn’t received much attention. That will change

The Look AHEAD trial began in 2001 and is scheduled to conclude in 2012. In it they randomly assigned 5,145 overweight people with type 2 diabetes to either a lifestyle intervention or to enhanced diabetes support and education.

AHEAD is shorthand for Action for Health and Diabetes. We sure like catchy acronyms, don’t we!

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Messages from two correspondents this week got me looking at and thinking about the Accu-Chek Aviva meter again. When it hit the market three years ago, I wrote a positive review of it for Diabetes Health magazine.

But with the multitude of new meters to check out since then, I haven’t been using my Aviva lately. That was a good thing.

“The Aviva meter will not let you use expired strips,” Kevin wrote me a few days ago. “It is also smart enough to know if you reset the date and time before the expired strips are due to expire.  I even did this with a new meter out of the box, and it still detected the strips had expired. It does this by looking at the codekey.”
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