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Diabetes Research

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.

by David Mendosa

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.

by David Mendosa

Diabetes Testing

Which Blood for Checking Glucose

The blood that we need to use to check our blood glucose levels may seem obvious. After all, it’s a check, not a test to pass or fail. We need to use our own blood, not blood borrowed from a friend or foe.

But until now some basic questions about blood glucose testing haven’t had a tested answer. They do now with the publication of a study in this month’s issue of Diabetes Care, a professional journal of the American Diabetes Association.

The abstract of the study, “Self-Monitoring of Blood Glucose: The Use of the First or the Second Drop of Blood” is free online. My friend Dr. Bill Quick, who also writes about diabetes for HealthCentral, sent me the full text of the study.

The seven Dutch diabetes professionals who researched basic questions about blood glucose testing recruited 123 people with diabetes. They checked the variability of their blood glucose testing results in four different situations:

1. When they did or did not wash their hands

2. After they handled fruit (specifically apples or bananas)

3. After washing their fingers that had touched the fruit

4. And two different amounts of pressure applied to their fingers — squeezing

Their conclusions were simple and straightforward. But now for the first time we have them based on the actual experience of real people who have diabetes:

1. We don’t have to waste a drop of blood to use a second drop — but only if we wash our hands first.

2. But when we aren’t in a position to wash our hands and they aren’t particularly dirty or exposed to something that has sugar in it, testing with a second drop of blood will work.

3. Which finger we use doesn’t matter.

4. When we apply heavy pressure — meaning squeezing a lot — we can get unreliable results.

“The first choice is to wash the hands with soap and water, dry them, and use the first drop of blood,” the authors wrote. “Firm squeezing of the finger should be avoided.” The authors admitted that they had a hard time defining the difference between firm and light squeezing.

Strangely, the study did not look at the old recommendation that we should use alcohol to clean our fingers. Maybe they read my review of the Clever Chek meter, which I wrote here in November 2007. I hope that I disposed of the myth that it’s better not to use alcohol.

“The [Clever Chek] packaging includes a box of ‘Alcohol Prep Pads,’” I wrote then. But, “Any alcohol on the skin may interfere with your test result, so the experts don’t recommend that you use alcohol prep pads routinely. Only where you don’t have warm water is it a good idea to use alcohol to clean the test area. And be sure to air dry it well before testing.”

Now, let’s all go and test our blood glucose with confidence that we know what we are doing.

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

by David Mendosa

Psychosocial

Indigenous Diabetes

Diabetes is the scourge of civilization. A disproportionate number of people living in the most advanced societies suffer from it.

But the people who suffer the most are the original inhabitants of the lands that the Western societies occupied. Whether they are the Native Americans, people of Canada’s First Nations, Australia’s Indigenous population, or other conquered peoples, the result everywhere has been the same — lots of diabetes.

The reason why is no mystery. The conquerors destroyed the indigenous cultures, often intentionally but with what they thought were good intentions. By punishing students in native schools for using their own language, by attacking native religion, and by extolling the wonders of Western food, the victors hoped to integrate the defeated into mainstream culture. Instead, they marginalized the defeated from both their own culture and from that of the West.

Decrying their food choices of the defeated misses the point, as Sousan Abadian elucidates in her Harvard University Ph.D. dissertation. The point is that they suffer what she calls “collective trauma.”

Craig Lambert interviewed her for his brilliant article, “Trails of Tears, and Hopes,” for the March-April 2008 issue of Harvard Magazine. You can read the PDF of the full article online.

by David Mendosa

Diabetes Diet

Another Nail in the SAD Coffin

The standard American diet that our medical establishment so dearly loves is dying a slow, painful death. And it’s coming not a moment too soon. The diet’s death is arriving after it killed so many of us and crippled millions more with diabetes or obesity.

The Mediterranean diet is that standard American diet. Based on whole grains, low-fat dairy products, vegetables, fruit, fish, and oils and margarines, this diet fad owes everything to a gentleman named Ancel Keys. His masterpiece was the Seven Countries Study, which he launched in 1956 and published its results beginning in 1970.

The Seven Countries Study was, however, fatally flawed. Keys cherry picked data that fitted his preconceptions, ignoring data from more than a dozen other countries that wouldn’t support what he tried to prove. Our medical establishment believes to this day that he did prove the negative effects of fat on heart health. And thus the Seven Countries Study was the genesis of the Mediterranean diet that so many of us believe in to our detriment.

Fortunately for all of us, Gary Taubes has demolished this myth. His masterpiece is Good Calories, Bad Calories. I think everyone who can read English needs to master this work, which is far too detailed for me to even attempt to summarize here.
Continue Reading

by David Mendosa

Diabetes Medication

Meeting the tiniBoy Lancet Inventor in Korea

Stanley Kim is a practicing physician in Southern California who recently invented the smallest and painless lancets for testing our blood glucose. I wrote about this invention here this August.

At that time Dr. Kim and I hadn’t met. I interviewed him on the phone from my home office in Colorado.

We had to travel all the way to South Korea to meet in person. We are in Busan, Korea’s second largest city with about 3.6 million residents. Specifically, we are both attending the International Diabetes Federation’s Western Pacific Region Congress along with about 3,000 other people who work with diabetes. This congress is taking place in Busan Exhibition and Convention Center (BEXCO) in the most modern part of the city near Haeundae, the most famous and frequented beach in all of South Korea.

As modern as Korea is — particularly in this part of the country — it is naturally quite different from what I normally experience in Colorado. But for Dr. Kim, Busan is quite familiar. He grew up in Busan and has a condo here.

Until I mentioned the meeting during the course of the interview for the article I wrote here in August, Dr. Kim didn’t know that it was happening in his hometown this year. He then arranged to attend the meeting. And at the last minute the conference organizers approved his poster presentation for the tiniBoy lancets. Continue Reading

by David Mendosa

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