Can Drinking Coffee Help Prevent Type 2 Diabetes?

If you begin your day with a steaming cup of joe, you could be protecting your health along with jump-starting your morning. That's because research shows coffee may reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes. But how much do you need to drink to reap the potential benefits?
What the Research Says
Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital conducted one of the biggest long-term studies on the relationship between coffee and type 2 diabetes in 2004. They found that the more coffee people drank, the greater the protection against diabetes.
The study followed 41,934 men for 12 years and 84,276 women for 18 years. At the beginning of the study, the participants did not have type 2 diabetes. They were asked to answer questions about their coffee-drinking habits (regular and decaffeinated) every two to four years. During that time, 1,333 new cases of type 2 diabetes were reported among the men and 4,085 cases were reported among the women.
Men who reported drinking more than six cups of regular, caffeinated coffee per day cut their risk of developing type 2 diabetes in half when compared to nondrinkers of coffee. Women who reported drinking that much cut their risk by about 30 percent. Decaffeinated coffee also showed benefits, but the results were weaker.
Another study suggested that the more coffee you drink, the better. In the same year as the Harvard study, researchers in Finland, the country with the highest per capita coffee consumption in the world, found that the risk of developing diabetes appeared significantly lower in people who dran Continue reading

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The Best Apps for People With Diabetes

F inding it hard to remember to log your blood sugar levels? Want a central place to store your data? For people with diabetes, technology can take out the guesswork. Read on for the latest in apps and other gadgets...
The best diabetes management is by the numbers: blood sugar readings, insulin doses and grams of carbs you’re consuming. That can overwhelm any diabetes patient.
But technology can help.
Need to record your blood glucose level? A wireless meter can do that. Want to know how many carbs are in that slice of pepperoni pizza? An app can tell you.
More than 29 million people in the U.S. are diagnosed with diabetes, according to the American Diabetes Association (ADA). There’s no cure, so it’s crucial that people with diabetes deal with it daily. The more data they collect, the better their management of the disease.
Some people can log data with a simple paper logbook and pencil. But many can’t, won’t be bothered or just plain forget – and that can hinder treatment.
When patients forget to log blood glucose readings or don’t bring logbooks to appointments, time is wasted trying to have the patient recall the data, says Amy Aponick, a registered dietitian and certified diabetes educator at Shands, the University of Florida Diabetes Center of Excellence, in Gainesville. Continue reading

Diabetes and Hot Flashes

If you’re a woman approaching or in menopause, hot flashes may be the bane of your existence. Those all-too-familiar bursts of heat can mean discomfort and much misery. Women who have diabetes may have hot flashes that can be linked with low blood sugars, too. Read on to learn more about hot flashes and what you can do to help keep them at bay.
What exactly are hot flashes?
Hot flashes are sudden feelings of intense warmth that can come on over a few minutes or, more likely, all of a sudden. They are often accompanied by other symptoms, such as redness of the face or neck, sweating, rapid heartbeat, headache, and then feeling chilled once the flash has passed.
“Night sweats,” or hot flashes that occur at night and result in excessive sweating, can be particularly disruptive to sleep. Recurring night sweats can lead to insomnia.
While hot flashes can occur in anyone for a variety of reasons, they’re very common in women who are approaching menopause (perimenopause) or who are menopausal. (Men can also have hot flashes due to androgen deprivation therapy.) There’s no rhyme or reason to them, either: they can vary in intensity, they can come and go quickly or linger, and they can persist for months or even for years. Hot flashes are also more likely to occur in women who are overweight or who smoke. African-American women are more likely to get hot flashes than Caucasian women; women of Asian descent are less likely to experience them.
What causes hot flashes?
The cause of hot flashes is somewhat of a mystery. However, scientists believe that they’re related to imb Continue reading

How we ‘fixed’ our diabetic dad – and saved his life

When their father, Geoff, was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes at the age of 50, brothers Ian and Anthony Whitington were not hugely surprised, and for 10 years, they drifted along and watched from the sidelines.
“Dad had always been the ‘big man’,” says Anthony, 39. “As kids, we thought it was funny. Dad could drink more than anyone, he could eat more than anyone. It was his identity. That’s our dad and that’s what he does.”
“As we got older, of course we worried,” adds Ian, 37. “But everyone around us would say, ‘If he doesn’t want to change, you can’t change him. He has to do it himself.’” So nothing much was done – and Geoff joined the 3.5m adults in the UK who manage their diabetes with ever-greater doses of medication and regular check-ups.
“We were all resigned to our family roles,” says Anthony. “I was a busy financial adviser with four kids of my own. Ian was a busy cameraman with jobs all over the world. Dad was a funny fat guy who drank too much.”
The wake-up calls were different for both of them. For Anthony, it was a family trip to Chessington zoo in 2013. By then, Geoff weighed 127kg (20 stone), had high blood pressure, atrial fibrillation (abnormal heart rhythm), plus everything diabetes could throw at him – a swollen prostate, poor circulation, ulcers on one foot and a bone deformity on the other.
“We were walking around this theme park when the bones collapsed through his foot,” says Anthony. “I remember him grabbing a railing, the blood in his sock, getting him back to the car. Suddenly, this thing that the d Continue reading

11 ways to start reversing type 2 diabetes today

Whether you have a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes or or you’ve been told you’re at risk, read on for 11 ways to start reversing the effects immediately.
Type 2 diabetes is reaching epidemic proportions. There are 3.9 million people living with diabetes – 90 per cent those of being affected by type 2 diabetes. Here’s another shocking statistic: 1 in 3 UK adults has prediabetes, the condition that precedes diabetes.
As you’ll soon see on BBC One’s Doctor in the House, it is entirely possible to both prevent as well as reverse type 2 diabetes. Unfortunately, a lot of the advice that is given for the condition is, in my opinion, unhelpful and misguided. Most people think of it as a blood sugar problem but this is the ultimate effect rather than the cause.
WHAT IS TYPE 2 DIABETES?
Type 2 diabetes is a condition that is characterised by chronically elevated blood sugar levels. However, the main cause as well as the driver for this condition is something called Insulin Resistance. When you eat certain foods, particularly refined carbohydrates, that food is converted to sugar inside your body. Your body’s way of dealing with this sugar is to produce a hormone called insulin. Insulin moves the sugar inside your cells so that it can be used for energy. Sounds great, right?
Well, yes and no. When working efficiently, this is a fantastic system that helps your body to function well. But when you have type 2 diabetes, prediabetes or significant abdominal obesity, that system does not work so well.
Eating too many refined carbohydrates elevates your insulin levels for long pe Continue reading