Parenting Your Teen With Type 1 Diabetes

Parenting Your Teen with Type 1 Diabetes

By Nicole Kofman and Ashley Dartnell
Twitter summary: Teenagers + type 1 diabetes = a challenge! Tips from #CWDFFL15 & a parent
For most families, “‘adolescence is second only to infancy’ in terms of the upheaval it generates” within a household. Add managing type 1 diabetes into the mix, and things can get complicated. For parents, it can be daunting to balance giving teens space to grow and monitoring a 24/7 condition as dangerous as type 1 diabetes.
At CWD’s Friends For Life conference in July, Dr. Jill Weissberg-Benchell and CDEs Natalie Bellini and Marissa Town led a workshop called “Parenting Your Teen with Type 1.” There, they elicited an impressive list of diabetes-specific concerns that parents have regarding their teens, including but not limited to:
How can they have the peace of mind of knowing their child is reasonably within range without being a helicopter parent?
What will happen when their teen begins to drive and could have a low?
How do growth hormones interact with insulin and affect blood sugar?
How will alcohol affect diabetes management?
What additional steps do people with type 1 diabetes need to take to be prepared for college entrance exams?
All that – on top of keeping up with schoolwork and extracurricular activities! We learned some great tips from the experts and parents at this workshop. Plus, we sat down with Ashley Dartnell, a parent of one of diaTribe’s summer associates who has type 1 diabetes, to learn more about her personal experience parenting a teen with type 1 and to gain a unique perspective outside of what we lear Continue reading

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The fast answer to beating type 2 diabetes

More than 29 million people in the U.S. have diabetes and another 86 million adults (more than one in three) are pre-diabetic.
And according to the CDC, 15 to 30 percent of those people with prediabetes will develop type 2 diabetes within five years without major lifestyle changes.
Even worse, the percentage of people developing diabetes has continued to rise year over year for the last 50 years thanks to our increasingly sedentary lifestyles and the low-fat food trend that upped the amount of blood sugar-elevating carbs in the American diet.
If you are one of the more than 100 million Americans who either suffers from diabetes or has blood sugar problems, changing your diet the best place to start.
Eating more vegetables, fiber and fish are all parts of the “Diabetes Diet” as well as avoiding sugar and processed foods.
While those are all good things, there is a simple dietary trick that most doctors completely neglect in helping patients avoid Type 2 diabetes…
Fasting and your blood sugar
Fasting is reducing or completely eliminating the consumption of food or drink for a certain amount of time.
Studies have shown fasting may improve pancreatic function, improve your insulin levels and your insulin sensitivity, enhance metabolism and weight loss, improve body composition and prevent and even reverse type 2 diabetes.
There are a number of ways to achieve the blood sugar control benefits delivered by fasting and you can choose the method that works best for you…
#1 – Alternating days
In this model of intermittent fasting, you alternate days of normal calorie consu Continue reading

7 Ways to Stop the Progression of Prediabetes into Diabetes

Not only is diabetes a huge health threat, but millions of Americans are already struggling with the condition also.
But prediabetes is something that people sadly take for granted.
Not only is it a sign of diabetes development, but it is also a sign that you can help your system to prevent actually getting diabetes.
An estimated number of 37 million Americans experience symptoms of prediabetes.
A more alarming number is the number 87, which indicates the 86 million of Americans that have a prediabetes diagnosis already.
A number of 471 million people globally is the expected estimate of people with prediabetes by 2035.
What Is Prediabetes?
Prediabetes is the condition that has an elevated blood sugar level, and the percentage is right under the scale of the diagnosis for diabetes.
Basically, before a person develops diabetes type II, they become prediabetic.
Having prediabetes puts you at a risk a lot higher than normal people for developing cardiovascular diseases, as well as diabetes type II.
Even though there are rare and clear symptoms of prediabetes, if you get checked, and your levels are the following:
Fasting blood glucose: 100 to 125 mg/dl
A two-hour blood glucose: 140 mg/dl – 199 mg/dl
A1C: 5.7% – 6.4%
You unfortunately most likely have prediabetes.
However, some cases experience diabetic symptoms, but are actually prediabetic.
Feeling abnormally thirsty, abnormally urinating, and feeling fatigues are some of the symptoms prediabetics also might experience.
Prediabetes Risk-Factors
The older you get, the risk of developing prediabetes gets higher and higher.
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The Connection Between Diabetes and Depression We Have to Talk About

Depression: another big D word and largely silent, invisible illness. Standing alone it can be emotionally devastating and incredibly difficult to cope with. Add diabetes, and depression is often given further means to fester and grow quite dramatically, with stable blood sugar control often overlooked or given less attention than it needs to have. Most recent studies show that depression is twice more commonly found in individuals that have diabetes than those without.
But why? And how do we address it? Uncontrolled diabetes can be problematic enough to treat, especially with many health practitioners not addressing the emotional roots of the diagnosis at all. With depression thrown into the mix the proactive approach a person with diabetes needs to take can fall easily by the wayside, with self-care becoming a burden. Of course, such despondency can often be a part of someone experiencing diabetes with an eating disorder as well. Depression, diabetes and an eating disorder make up a dangerous mix whereby each condition can be fueled by the others, maintaining a cycle that is difficult to break out of.
Despite the high numbers of people with diabetes who also experience depression, any information available upon diagnosis is sorely lacking. You are typically given all the education that you need in relation to what insulin to take, what to do in cases of hypo or hyperglycaemia and which snacks are better than others, but what about the emotional issues? It seems quite rare that any insight or support is provided to acknowledge what coping with diabetes can do to your head. Continue reading

Antibiotic abuse is on track to kill more people than cancer and diabetes. Can food help?

England’s Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies recently made headlines around the world when she again warned of an impending “post-antibiotic apocalypse.” Sounding no less disastrous, the World Health Organization has said that we’re “heading towards a post-antibiotic era, in which many common infections will no longer have a cure and [will] once again kill unabated.” How have we arrived here? And how can we protect ourselves while researchers race to find alternatives to antibiotics and new classes of bacteria-busting drugs?
For nearly a century, antibiotics have been overprescribed, under-regulated and misunderstood. Because of all the good they have done treating infectious diseases around the world, we, as doctors and as a society at-large, became excessively reliant on them to treat everything from acne to tuberculosis, pneumonia to urinary tract infections (UTIs) to gonorrhea. Antibiotics are also widely used for preterm babies and to support the immune system before and after surgeries, cancer treatments and organ transplants. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is nothing new—the father of antibiotics, Sir Walter Fleming, even warned of it in his Nobel Prize winner’s lecture—but it is accelerating. And while scientists were once constantly introducing new antibiotics to replace the ineffective ones, we are now decades behind in discovering and deploying new antibiotics.
In the meantime, more deadly bacteria grow resistant to the available antibiotics. “Nightmare bacteria” or “superbugs” have emerged, with a major report by economist Jim O’ Continue reading