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diabetes

Diabetes Diet, Exercise For Diabetes

The New York Times: “Is Sugar Toxic?”

In 1961 I started to read The New York Times when I went to work in Washington. But its magazine always disappointed me.

Until Sunday. This week’s issue focuses on “Health and Wellness 2011.” All four of the magazine’s main articles are essential reading for everyone.

The cover story by Gary Taubes, “Is Sugar Toxic?,” makes the case against sugar. This isn’t his first time to tilt at the medical establishment in this magazine. Nine years ago his article, “What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?,” began his crusade to expose the myth that fat was bad and carbohydrates are good.

His 2007 book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, built on that article so well that it convinced me and thousands of others to follow a very low-carb diet. In “Addicted to Carbs” I wrote here three years ago about how that book changed my life. With his book, Why We Get Fat: and What to Do About It, Taubes takes his argument to a wider, non-scientific audience.

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Diabetes Complications, Diabetes Diet

Study: Healthy Fasting Reduces Risk of Heart Disease, Diabetes

Regular readers may remember that I reported here on earlier studies about some benefits from intermittent fasting. But a study reported yesterday shows that fasting also lowers the risk of heart disease and diabetes and increases the good HDL cholesterol and reduces triglycerides, weight, and blood glucose levels. It also increases the bad LDL cholesterol.

Research cardiologists at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute in Murray, Utah, reported these finds at the annual scientific sessions of the American College of Cardiology in New Orleans. Tomorrow’s issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology will print the results of this study led by Dr. Benjamin D. Horne, Intermountain’s director of cardiovascular and genetic epidemiology.

LDL went up by 14 percent and HDL by 6 percent. But the increase in cholesterol from fasting is probably not a bad thing, as Dr. Horne explains.

“Fasting causes hunger or stress,” he pointed out. “In response, the body releases more cholesterol, allowing it to utilize fat as a source of fuel, instead of glucose. This decreases the number of fat cells in the body. This is important because the fewer fat cells a body has, the less likely it will experience insulin resistance or diabetes.”

Dr. Horne’s team conducted two fasting studies. One included more than 200 people. Another included 30 people who only had water for 24 hours and then studied for another day. During this additional 24-hour period the researchers subjected the subjects to blood tests and other physical measurements.

Now I have the incentive to get back to intermittent fasting. Just as soon as I finish the fish in my fridge.

This article is based on an earlier version of my article published by HealthCentral.

Psychosocial

Embrace Diabetes Support Groups for a Healthy Lifestyle

If you have ever participated in a diabetes support group, you probably know that it helps you to stay in control of your diabetes. While I don’t know of any research that will prove this, a new study shows that group support meetings offer remarkable benefits for people who have pre-diabetes. If group support helps people who have pre-diabetes, it is probably much more likely to help those of us who are already burdened with this condition. For most people I know who have pre-diabetes this is just one more thing to deal with. Sometime.

Those of us who have diabetes know that we have to deal with it. Every day. But some people who have diabetes still don’t take advantage of the support that other people can give them. For some of us diabetes is something to keep quiet about, either out of shame or concern that our employers might cause them problems. Or because their health insurance rates might go up.

Some of these concerns are certainly legitimate. But when we ignore the social advantages of sharing, we ignore the support we can get from friends in similar situations.

More and more of us are choosing a third alternative, online support.

The study of people with pre-diabetes who have benefited from support groups that prompted these thoughts comes to us from Australia. Between 2005 and 2009 the Victorian Department of Health recruited 300 people from both the big city of Melbourne and the rural community of Shepparton to see if community meetings are as good for health as they are for making friends.

They are. The bottom line is that people who attended regular meetings had a 43 percent success rate in reversing their pre-diabetes within six months of learning that they had it. By comparison, only one quarter of the people who had learned that they have pre-diabetes in that time but only had the support of their doctor succeeded.

Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne evaluated the study and reported it in the March 2011 issue of Swinburne Magazine. This article says that the Victorian Department of Health is taking these positive findings a step further by rolling out a state-wide program.

The question is whether people here who already have diabetes will take the further step to get valuable support from others.

This article is based on an earlier version of my article published by HealthCentral.

Diabetes Complications, Diabetes Diet

Preventing Blindness with Omega 3

Diabetic retinopathy is a leading cause of blindness, one of the most serious complications of diabetes. But omega 3 fatty acids can help protect us from it. Fish oil, particularly from fatty fish like salmon and sardines, is our best food source of omega 3. Capsules of fish or krill oil are a good choice for people who don’t eat much fish.

Omega-3 fatty acids are highly concentrated in the retina, the light-sensitive tissue that lines the inner surface of our eyes. But the typical American diet is awfully low in omega-3 and high in omega 6, which competes with omega 3 to get into the cells of our bodies, as I wrote here last year.

We’ve known from studies of mice that omega 3 can prevent retinopathy. When researchers fed mice diets rich in omega 3, the mice had nearly 50 percent less pathologic vessel growth in the retina than mice fed diets rich in omega 6. But many of us, myself included, discount mice studies, because we are men and women, not mice, and all of us are much bigger and many of us are much brighter.Now a study from a research team at Children’s Hospitl Boston shows the way omega 3 protects mice — and hopefully us people — from blindness. A recent issue of Science Tranlational Medicine reported this study. The researchers isolated the specific omega-3 compound that has beneficial effects in mice. Technically, it is a metabolite of the omega-3 fatty acid DHA, known as 4-HDHA), and the enzyme that produces it (5-lipoxygenase, or 5-LOX.

For people with diabetes this is important research. “Between 40 to 45 percent of Americans diagnosed with diabetes have some stage of diabetic retinopathy,” according to the National Eye Institute. “The longer someone has diabetes, the more likely he or she will get diabetic retinopathy.”

Now, we have a much better chance of stopping diabetic retinopathy in its tracks. The first line of defense is our diet, specifically increasing the amount of omega 3 and reducing how much omega 6 fatty acids we eat.

This article is based on an earlier version of my article published by HealthCentral.

Diabetes Diet

Comparing Weight Loss on a Program or Alone

Almost all of us who have diabetes have to struggle with our weight. So, wouldn’t it be easier with a formal weight loss program?

Probably not, according to the results of a presentation to the Fourth International Congress of Behavioral Medicine in Washington, D.C. The National Weight Control Registry just brought this unpublished study to my attention.

The National Weight Control Registry is the largest prospective investigation of long-term successful weight loss maintenance. It tracks the progress of more than 5,000 people who have lost a lot of weight and have kept it off for a long time. I am one of those people whom it tracks.

Actually, I don’t consider that the registry’s standards are all that high. To join you only have to show that you have lost at least 30 pounds and have kept it off for at least a year.

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Diabetes Testing

Why We Check Our Blood

With all the emphasis on how we check our blood glucose levels using all the new meters that we can choose from, many of us who have type 2 diabetes forget or never learned why we check our levels. Anyone who has type 1 diabetes has to know why he or she checks as do those type 2s who uses insulin. Those of us who inject insulin check their levels so they can take more if their levels are too high or take a glucose tab or something similar if they are too low.But three-fourths of all type 2s don’t take insulin. Some of them still use the first oral medication, one of the sulfonylureas that can cause hypos, a level below about 70 mg/dl. Then they too will need to take something like a glucose tab to bring their level back to normal.

The overwhelming majority of all people who have diabetes rarely if ever get hypos. So why should they go through the trouble of checking their blood glucose? What can they do with that information?

If our doctors and nurses ever told us why, most of us have forgotten by now. As a result, a lot of people with diabetes don’t bother at all any more with blood glucose checks.

That’s a shame, because even people who don’t use insulin or one of the sulfonylureas, can benefit from checking if they do it at the right time.

The most right time is after eating a big meal, especially one that has a substantial amount of starch in it. Nothing raises our blood glucose level as much and as fast as starch — the stuff in potatoes and grains and grain products, like bread, bagels, pizza, or anything made from wheat flour.

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