Diets And Diabetes – Let’s Compare!

Diets and Diabetes – Let’s Compare!

“The word diet comes from the old French word diete and the medieval Latin word dieta meaning a daily food allowance.” Diets are, “a set course of eating and drinking in which the kind and amount of food should be planned to achieve weight loss and better health.”
According to Dr. Roxanne Sukol, a preventative medicine specialist at The Wellness Institute at Cleveland Clinic, “The spread of conflicting information and even misinformation may be playing a role in America’s obesity epidemic.” Referring to recent data collected by the CDC, “50% of Americans have either diabetes or pre-diabetes by age 65.” Most people are still confused about what healthy eating is and it’s not because they are not trying, but because it can be very confusing. Many Americans make choices based on “taste and pricing” with “healthfulness” in third place. Labels can be conflicting and confusing stating “this food is healthy” even when it may not be. Americans recently received a failing grade in nutrition literacy from the findings presented by The International Food Information Council Foundation. According to Dr. Fatima Stanford, MD, MPH, MPA, from Mass. General Hospital in Boston, “There is no one strategy that is universally effective in helping people achieve a healthy weight and lower their risk of chronic diseases.” We do know that yo–yo dieting that is severely restrictive can lead to bingeing and may lead to insulin resistance, pre-diabetes, diabetes, hypertension, and elevated cholesterol and eventual heart disease. How you eat should always remain s Continue reading

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All About Insulin Use In Diabetes

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What is insulin?
Insulin is a hormone that your body produces to help convert the food you eat into energy. People with diabetes might need insulin injections either because they don’t produce enough insulin in their bodies or they can’t properly use the insulin that they do produce or both.
Insulin injections have come a long way since they were first used to treat diabetes in the 1920s.There are not only different types of insulin to meet each user’s individual needs, but also different ways to inject insulin.
Also read: 3 Simple Steps To Prevent Gestational Diabetes
The insulin injection process itself has become easy and virtually painless. Insulin is like a key that opens up the locks on your body's cells so that glucose (blood sugar) can get inside and be used for energy. Insulin Helps Glucose Get Into Your Body's Cells. If the glucose can't get into your cells, it builds up in your blood stream. If left untreated, high blood glucose can cause long-term complications.
Additionally, when blood sugar reaches a certain level, the kidneys try to get rid of it through urine - which means that you'll need to urinate more often. Frequent urination can make you feel tired, thirsty, or hungry. You may also start losing weight. Your body also gets energy from a complex sugar called glycogen, which is stored in your liver and muscles. The liver converts glycogen to glucose and releases it into your bloodstream when you're under stress and/or when you're extremely hungry. When enough insulin is present, muscles Continue reading

What You Should Know About the Diabetes-Diarrhea Link

Diarrhea is one of the most unpleasant malfunctions that the body can experience. It does however have a purpose – usually to help the body to rid itself of waste, rapidly in liquid form, when there is a bacterial, viral or parasitic infection. There are other causes of diarrhea, and in the case of diabetes, some very specific reasons why diarrhea may present.
The many reasons you have the runs
If you’ve had a bout or several bouts of diarrhea, then you may know some of the other causes. They can include:
Consuming too many sugar alcohols in too short a period of time (chewing many pieces of sugarless gum, for example)
Consuming a food or drink containing lactose, when you are lactose intolerant
Taking a medication whose side effect can be diarrhea (such as Metformin)
Suffering with a disease like IBS (irritable bowel disease), Crohn’s disease or celiac disease
Having a peptic ulcer or gall bladder disease
Use of Orlistat for the treatment of obesity
Food poisoning
Antibiotic use, which can alter the delicate gut microbe balance
Having autonomic neuropathy, as with diabetes
The diarrhea will often resolve quickly when it’s due to some of these causes. Chronic Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes can raise the risk of experiencing chronic, intermittent episodes of diarrhea. Of course, managing or limiting stress, changing a medication like Metformin, and ruling out celiac disease (patients with either type of diabetes have a higher risk for this condition), can help to limit diabetes-related diarrhea episodes. When diabetes-related diarrhea is specifically caused by autonomic n Continue reading

7 Fruits to Avoid if You Have Diabetes

If you have diabetes, chances are someone has said that you are not allowed to eat fruit. This is not true; people with diabetes can eat fruit as part of their healthy eating plan. But, because fruit is a carbohydrate, it will affect your blood sugar and you cannot eat unlimited amounts.
Certain fruits may cause your blood sugars to spike at a quicker pace than others. The tricky part about eating with diabetes is that everyone responds to food differently. While one person may be able to eat apples without any issue, someone else may find that apples cause their blood sugars to spike. Testing your blood sugars before and after eating fruit can help you to determine which fruits are best for you.
Other ways to keep blood sugars controlled while enjoying fruit is to think about the context in which you eat it. You'll have a better chance at keeping your blood sugars controlled if you avoid juice altogether, limit your fruit servings to no more than two-to-three per day (one serving = 15 g of carbohydrate), pair your fruit with protein or include it into your meal as part of your carbohydrate choice, and avoid fruits that are very ripe. The riper a fruit is the higher its glycemic index, which means it will raise your blood sugar more than a food with a low glycemic index.
In addition to juice, there are certain fruits that make my do-not-eat list. These fruits have been placed on this list either because they have a higher glycemic index or because most people overeat them, which results in higher blood sugar.
One small grape contains one gram of carbohydrate, which means th Continue reading

HbA1c Testing for Diagnosing and Monitoring Diabetes

Diabetes, also known as diabetes mellitus, is a common metabolic disease that is characterized by frequent sessions of uncontrolled high blood sugar or hyperglycaemia caused by poor insulin production or increased resistance to insulin. The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that 8.5% of the global population was affected by diabetes in 2014, or roughly 422 million people.1
Diabetes is divided into two main types, type 1 and type 2. Type 1 diabetes is manifested by complete deficiency of insulin production, which results in uncontrolled blood glucose levels, type 1 diabetes is generally diagnosed in early childhood so is often referred to as juvenile diabetes.
While type 2 diabetes, the most common type, is characterized by the under production of insulin or the body’s cells becoming resistant to the action of insulin as a result of environmental and genetic factors which often present in adult life, so this type of diabetes is often referred to as adult-onset diabetes.
FBG and OGTT diagnostic testing methods
Previously, the measurement of two-hour plasma glucose through an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) or fasting blood glucose (FBG) was the main diagnostic protocol for diabetes.2 To diagnose a patient as diabetic via FBG or OGTT, the diagnostic criteria are:
FBG ≥7.0 mmol/l, or
Two-hour plasma blood glucose concentration should be ≥11.1 mmol/l, two hours after injecting a 75g anhydrous glucose through an OGTT
While a good level of accuracy is afforded by both testing methods, these have their own limitations. For instance, the FBG test requires 8 hours Continue reading