Dinner Ideas For People With Type 2 Diabetes

Dinner ideas for people with type 2 diabetes

Every 23 seconds, someone in the United States is diagnosed with diabetes. But although diabetes is widespread, public awareness and understanding of the disease can be limited.
The Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) report that 29 million Americans currently have diabetes, but a quarter of them do not know it. Another 86 million adults have prediabetes, with 90 percent of them being unaware.
Diabetes is a serious disease that can, if uncontrolled, lead to loss of eyesight, cardiovascular problems, kidney damage, and even amputation of lower limbs. The good news is, it can be managed and these serious health problems can be avoided.
Diet techniques for diabetes
The even better news is that diabetes can be managed through a combination of exercise, health care, and diet. Despite popular belief, a diet can be varied, tasty, and fulfilling.
The "diabetic plate"
Maintaining a consistent, well-balanced diet can help people with diabetes keep their blood sugar levels under control.
Portion control is also important, which is where the "diabetic plate" comes in.
Endorsed by several organizations, including the American Diabetes Association, the "diabetic plate" can be very helpful when planning dinners.
Follow these simple steps:
Draw an imaginary line down the center of your plate.
Divide one half into two further sections, so that your plate is now divided into three.
Fill the biggest section with non-starchy vegetables, such as spinach, green beans, salsa, mushrooms, broccoli, or others.
Use proteins to fill one of the smaller sections. Good options are skinless Continue reading

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Type 1 Diabetes – Starting out

Receiving a Type 1 Diabetes diagnosis can be a scary and confusing time for a family. Coping with and managing the new condition can be both stressful and overwhelming. Finding a solution for carrying diabetic supplies shouldn’t be another worry. We at SPIbelt work closely with the diabetic community providing specialty belts for children and adults with Type 1 Diabetes. Our belts are discreet and contain a pass-through hole that helps when carrying Insulin pumps or continuous glucose monitors.
To help with families that recently received a Type 1 diabetes diagnosis for their child; we have brought together two amazing women from the SPIbelt community to share their stories and some advice for the newly diagnosed.
Faith, mother to Gavin, a 9 year old who was diagnosed when he was 3 years old, is a prominent member in the T1D community and on the board of Camp Bluebonnet, a program that SPIbelt has sponsored for the past four years.
The second woman, Gretchen, is best known as the blogger to Type One Type Happy and is a 2017 SPIbelt Ambassador. She was diagnosed in 2014 and has become heavily involved offering Life Coaching to the T1D community. Through the #T1DSPI program, we hope to eliminate one step in the process by providing a FREE Diabetic SPIbelt to help carry pumps or other diabetic supplies, and helping to share similar experiences.
“There is so much to learn when first diagnosed with diabetes. Learning is best done one step at a time and keeping the whole family involved with the learning process. This will make sure there is a common understanding of the cond Continue reading

At 40, a Surprising Diagnosis: Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults

He did everything right, but Manny Hernandez’s blood sugar levels wouldn’t settle down. Then tests showed he had LADA, a type of diabetes he’d never heard of.
The numbers just didn’t make sense.
Diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2002, Manny Hernandez tackled it with everything he had. “I switched to a super-healthy, low-carb diet. I trained for my first half-marathon. I lost 25 pounds. I took my medication faithfully. I was the healthiest I’d ever been. But my blood sugar wouldn’t stay in an optimal range.”
Hernandez kept exercising, though more moderately, after running the Valley of the Sun Marathon in Phoenix, AZ, in early 2003. He tried “pretty much every metformin-based drug combination and dose on the market.” Yet his fasting blood sugar levels wouldn’t drop below 150. “Something wasn’t normal,” he says.
Perplexed, his family doctor sent him to an endocrinologist who measured levels of diabetes autoimmune antibodies and C-peptide (a substance that correlates with insulin levels) in his blood.
The results: Hernandez didn't have type 2 diabetes at all. He had LADA – Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults. His immune system was slowly attacking his insulin-producing beta cells. And his insulin levels were low enough that he needed daily insulin shots.
Hernandez wasn’t alone. An estimated one in ten people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes actually have LADA. This form of diabetes is like slow-moving type 1. But it’s usually mistaken for type 2 because it happens in adulthood, and doesn’t require insulin right away. Like type 2s, people with Continue reading

6 Ways to Connect Better with Your Spouse if You Have Diabetes

Your marriage can be a “secret weapon” that supports your efforts to take care of your diabetes, research shows. For instance, in one 2015 study of 129 people with type 2 diabetes, researchers from the University of California, Irvine, found that having a supportive spouse helped keep blood sugar from soaring to unhealthy levels in those whose diabetes was most affected by stress. And in a 2001 study from the State University of New York Upstate Medical Center of 78 people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes, those who were the happiest with their marriage were also the most satisfied with the way they were handling their diabetes.
Your spouse only wants the best for you, of course. But too often, stress , worry, misunderstandings and even unintended sabotage – can get in the way. These strategies can help you get the support you need from your spouse and defuse tensions, so the two of you can work together to keep your diabetes under control:
#1. Share a goal that’s bigger than diabetes. Talk about important future dreams and goals you can reach if you’re both healthy. A shared vision can keep you both feeling inspired, according to a 2009 Pennsylvania State University study of 30 people with diabetes and their spouses. Many said that finding a motivation that was important to both of them kept them exercising, for example. “I have one goal in life and that is to have our 50th wedding anniversary,” one volunteer said, noting that the goal kept both partners exercising regularly. “So I do not care what happens in between but we have to get to that goal.” Anoth Continue reading

Google's Research In Artificial Intelligence Helps In Preventing Blindness Caused by Diabetes

One of the principal causes of blindness is Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), a medical condition in which damage occurs to the retina due to diabetes. According to the United States National Library of Diabetes, more than 40 percent of Americans diagnosed with diabetes have some stage of Diabetic Retinopathy. The International Diabetes Federation estimates that are 415 million diabetic patients worldwide have the risk of DR.
Ophthalmologists diagnose the diabetic eye disease by examining the pictures of the back of the eye for lesions. The severity is identified by the presence of lesions that indicate bleeding and fluid leakage in the eye. Only experienced doctors and specialists can scan and interpret these pictures. There is an acute shortage of qualified ophthalmologists that can diagnose diabetic eye, which puts many patients at the risk of losing their eyesight.
Google Brain, the research team within Google that focuses on the application of AI, has collaborated with doctors in India and US to help them diagnose DR. The team has collected over 128,000 images that were each evaluated by 3-7 ophthalmologists from a panel of 54 ophthalmologists. These images were fed to a deep learning algorithm for creating a model to detect Diabetic Retinopathy. The performance of the algorithm was tested on two different datasets totaling to 12,000 images.
The predictions from Google Brain’s neural network algorithm were so close that it is considered to be on par with the diagnosis of experienced ophthalmologists. The application of Machine Learning (ML) in Diabetic Retinopathy is a brea Continue reading