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If you inject insulin or one of the GLP-1 agonists, the chances are that you are putting yourself at an unnecessary risk of a complication.
The needles you use are probably too long. Only 30 percent of the people who use insulin have adopted the much shorter 4 mm needle that became available in 2010. About half of the people who inject diabetes drugs reuse their needles, particularly those who inject with a pen. Only about 40 percent of needle users rotate their injection sites correctly.
If you have prediabetes, the standard advice to avoid getting diabetes is to do three things at once: cut calories, eat a low-fat diet, and get exercise. But a recent study shows that it makes more sense to focus on just the last one of these.
Ever since 2002, when researchers published the results of the Diabetes Prevention Program, we have known that intensive lifestyle changes are the best way to avoid diabetes. That program aimed at reducing your weight by 7 percent, eating a low-fat diet, and increasing your physical activity to at least 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise, such as walking or biking.
September was the “Fruits & Veggies–More Matters” month. But does it matter to those of us who have diabetes?
Fewer than 1 in 7 American adults eat the recommended amount of vegetables, the U.S. government says. The recommended amount isn’t much: just 2½ cup-equivalents (2½ cups of raw or cooked vegetables or vegetable juice, 5 cups of leafy salad greens, or 11⁄4 of a cups of dried vegetables).
Significantly, what our government considers to be vegetables do not include grains, which are a separate food group. Nor does the vegetable group include nuts, seeds, and soy products, which are considered to be a protein food.
These are some of the worst words to use about people with diabetes:
We aren’t diabetics who try to control our disease. Instead, we are people with diabetes who manage this condition.
Team Novo Nordisk in June asked people with diabetes, parents, and partners to share their opinions on the language of diabetes. Almost 400 people responded to the survey that the team published on August 15.
Your intimate relationships can suffer when you have diabetes. But it’s not inevitable.
Challenges to sexual performance remain a taboo subject for many people, even as sex itself has come out of the bedroom and our culture has become increasingly sex obsessed. Consequently, you may be reluctant to discuss your concerns with a date, a partner, or even with a healthcare provider.
Those of us who have diabetes tend to accept, albeit reluctantly, that we have or may get the physical complications that can come with it. Yet we too often try to hide the emotional complications that can be equally devastating to satisfactory intimate relationships.
When you eat protein and vegetables before eating food that’s high in carbohydrates, your blood glucose and insulin levels won’t spike as much after the meal as when you eat the carbs first. This is the main message of a new study previewed in June.
Alpana Shukla, MD, presented her findings in a poster, “Food Order Has a Significant Impact on Postprandial Glucose and Insulin Excursions,” at this year’s annual convention of the American Diabetes Association in New Orleans. This is the world’s largest scientific meeting focused on diabetes, and I represented HealthCentral.com.
The findings make an important point for those of us who have Type 2 diabetes. Until now, the conventional nutritional advice has been mostly negative — what not to eat, eat less, and so on. But it turns out the timing of what we eat matters too.
This new study is a small one, involving only seven people with Type 2 diabetes who are overweight or obese. Dr. Shukla and her seven Cornell associates measured the blood glucose levels of these participants every half hour for three hours after they ate the same amount of calories in protein, vegetables, and carbohydrates in a different order on separate days.