My most recent articles are:

Two Kittens

• My Diabetes Blog
  My new blog entries for February are:
  • Testing Survey. Roche commissioned a survey of testing habits of people with diabetes. The company thought the results were pretty bad. Actually, they are dismal.

  • Fiber and Diabetes. The doctors tell us that we should reduce the amount of carbohydrates, fat, and protein that we eat. Besides fiber, that doesn’t leave much. But how should we get that fiber?

  • Inefficiency is NEAT. It’s all right to kick yourself for being inefficient. Kicking yourself isn’t easy and it uses energy, something that most of us with diabetes don’t do often enough.

  • The Excursions You Don’t Want To Take. You can have a good A1C level  —  below 7  —  that masks wildly fluctuating blood glucose levels that do real damage. The new continuous sensors will change all that.

  • Flex Ex. Dr. Joe Prendergast reminds us all in his new book of the exercise that too many of us forget. Just a few minutes a week of flexibility training  —  which I call Flex Ex so I can feel more at home with it  —  will stop us from feeling so old.

  • It’s a Long Way to Tepary Beans. Which beans are high in protein and low glycemic? Answer: The little-known tepary bean of the American southwest. It’s tasty too.

  • Stalking Byetta. Immediately after starting on Byetta, my blood glucose levels are better than they ever were, usually in the 80s and 90s. And my appetite is satisfied on much less food. It’s working wonders for me  —  once I determined that my health insurance would pay for it and once I found a doctor who knew about it and would prescribe it.

  • Support by Mailing List . Computer mailing lists are one of the best ways to get emotional support for what all of us with diabetes have to go through. If you don’t already subscribe to one or more of these groups, here is how to do it.

• A Vase for Your Insulin Vials
  A vase is good for holding more than flowers. If it is designed right, as the Vial Vase is, it can hold up to five vials of insulin in your refrigerator in a small space and more conveniently than leaving the vials in their separate paper boxes. This article originally appeared on my website at Vial Vase.

• A couple of days ago the U.S. Department of Agriculture uploaded a valuable table that lets us look up the added sugars, total sugars, and carbohydrates in 2,041 common foods. The USDA defines added sugars in this table as those sugars added to foods and beverages during processing or home preparation. The data reported are estimated values based on the added sweeteners listed under “ingredients” on the package labels of processed foods and beverages. Some added sugars listed under ingredients include honey, molasses, fruit juice concentrate, brown sugar, corn sweetener, sucrose, lactose, glucose, high-fructose corn syrup, and malt syrup. You can download the new table as a PDF or Excel file by going tohttp://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=12107.

  This table complements previous USDA contributions to our knowledge of what we eat. An earlier table shows the Sugar Content of Selected Food.

  The USDA National Nutrient Database, SR18, is the nutritional gold standard. It’s online at http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/. This huge database shows dozens of nutrients in 7,146 foods. Searching online works great if you aren’t trying to get data on many foods or nutrients. But if you use it a lot, you can save a lot of time by downloading the database to your own computer at http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=8964.

Announcements:

• This Newsletter
  Diabetes Update keeps you up-to-date with new articles, Web pages, and books that I have written about diabetes.

  I list and link most of these on my at Diabetes Directory and in the site’s menu at the upper left of all my Web pages.

  From time to time Diabetes Update may also include links to other Web pages of special interest.

• HTML Format
  I send out Diabetes Update e-mail in HTML format, which all Web browsers and most modern e-mail programs can display. HTML has live links to all the sites named in the text so that with a simple click of a mouse you can connect to the site you have just been reading about.

• My Guarantee
  This newsletter:
  1. Is and will remain free.
  2. Will never include advertising (except targeted Google ads at the bottom of the web page and not in the email newsletter).
  3. Nor will I ever sell, rent, or trade your e-mail address to anyone.
  4. I will link sources of information.
  5. I will disclose any conflict of interest.
  6. If and when I learn of any errors of fact, I will correct them.

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