My most recent articles are:

Pascale Shostal

• Blood and Sweat without Toil and Tears.
  VivoMedical in Cupertino, California is developing non-invasive meter that measures glucose in sweat instead of glucose in blood. The trick is to correlate sweat with blood glucose. The company says that is pretty much what it figured out. My article originally appeared in the June 2006 issue of Diabetes Health and is now also online here.

• The First Book about Byetta.
  Strange that the first book about Byetta is for children. It’s strange because the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t approved Byetta for children yet. This lovely little book will, however, interest anyone who is using Byetta to control blood glucose or weight. It will also make a great present for any Byetta user.

• My Diabetes Blog
  My new blog entries for May are:
  • The Insulin Index. It is a mystery why most foods that are low glycemic are also low on the insulin index. But certain foods, particularly dairy products are low glycemic but high on the insulin index. Does this mean that we should eat more or less of these foods?

  • LifeScan Gets It Right. The new Ultra2 blood glucose meter from LifeScan does what meters always should do but haven’t until now. The Ultra2 makes it easy for us to track our before-meal and after-meal levels separately.

  • What’s the Point of Testing? Almost two-thirds of people with diabetes don’t test after meals. Many of us wouldn’t know what a good blood glucose level is even if we did test then. This is sad, because testing two hours after the start of a meal is rapidly becoming the preferred time to test.

  • Eating Locally and Seasonally. People with diabetes need to eat the foods with the highest nutrient density, because of our impaired immune system. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), where you get locally-grown food in season is one of the best ways to insure that we get the highest quality food.

  • The Dirty Dozen Foods. Even the biggest natural foods stores, Whole Foods and Wild Oats, continue to sell so-called “conventional” as well as organic food. Conventional food is loaded with pesticides. How can you tell which of these conventional foods are the worst? I name the 12 most heavily contaminated here.

  • Leptin and Diabetes. Two recent books and more than 10,000 scientific studies of leptin in the past decade testify to the continuing scientific interest in this recently discovered hormone. It is relevant to people with diabetes, especially in terms of our diet.

  • Cinnamon Update. Whether or not cinnamon reduces blood glucose, it tastes good. Just don’t rely on it alone.

  • Magnesium and Diabetes. Science now has even more evidence that magnesium is essential not only to help control diabetes but also to ward off cancer and heart attacks. Are you getting enough magnesium?

  • The INGAP Revival. People keep asking whatever happened to INGAP? In spite of one setback after another, it is still alive and may yet help us regenerate islet cells.

  • Advanced Glycation and Diabetes. Cooking foods at high temperatures is unhealthful because it dramatically increases the production of advanced glycation end products (AGEs). These compounds in the blood stimulate cells to produce inflammation-causing proteins. And people with diabetes already have too much inflammation. Here’s how your diet can help.

Updates:

• MEDLINE: A Guide to Effective Searching in PubMed and Other Interfaces. The second edition of Brian S. Katcher’s book about searching MEDLINE has helped me and others to find diabetes-related research. If you are one of those people who take responsibility for your diabetes, you will want to know how to search for it. This book, although rather dry and somewhat expensive, is the best guide I know.

  I reviewed the first edition of this book about seven years ago. For the new second edition I turned to Chris Engleman, co-director of the Grillo Health Information Center, where I am a volunteer staffer, for his professional review.

• 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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