Senior Diabetes Prevention: 7 Tips To Reduce Your Risk

Senior Diabetes Prevention: 7 Tips to Reduce Your Risk

Over 25% of seniors age 65 and older are living with diabetes, some not even knowing they have the disease. Having diabetes can lead to serious complications over time, including heart disease, kidney damage and vision loss – but in many cases, the damage is preventable.
Types of Diabetes
For National Diabetes Month, we’d like to highlight what seniors can do to prevent diabetes or lower their risk if they have it.
To start, we need to clarify that there are two main types of diabetes:
Type 1 Diabetes
Type 1 diabetes is the least common of the two types and it isn’t preventable. Typically appearing while someone’s still relatively young, Type 1 diabetes is neither curable or preventable, but it is manageable if you cultivate the right healthy habits – like being careful with their diet and taking insulin for the rest of their lives. In fact, today’s seniors are the first generation where a large number of people with Type 1 diabetes have been able to live into their senior years with minimal complications.
Type 2 Diabetes
The more common form of diabetes, Type 2 diabetes, is preventable. Getting it is largely related to lifestyle and it usually shows up a bit later in life, in people middle aged and older. Lifestyle changes can make a difference in preventing Type 2 diabetes before it occurs, as well as being able to reverse the effects of it after it’s been diagnosed.
What You Can Do to Prevent Type 2 Diabetes
One of the main goals of National Diabetes Month is to help people understand the lifestyle changes they can make proactively to avoid a diagnosis of T Continue reading

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Pregnant and Pumping

Great Expectations
A healthy pregnancy with diabetes is a challenge, but consider this: Less than 100 years ago, before the discovery of insulin, many young women with Type 1 diabetes didn’t even live to reach childbearing age. And less than 30 years ago, physicians routinely told young women with Type 1 diabetes that pregnancy was far too dangerous for both mother and child. Today, thanks to advances in diabetes treatment, plus improvements in medical care for infants, there has never been a better time for you to have a healthy baby. Insulin pump therapy is one of the options available to women today for managing diabetes during pregnancy.
Challenges of pregnancy
Pregnancy with diabetes presents a variety of challenges for you and your diabetes management team far beyond the routine morning sickness, fatigue, and strange food cravings experienced by many women who are expecting. The length of time you’ve had diabetes as well as the course of your disease influences the seriousness of medical risks during your pregnancy. For example, if you have mild retinopathy, it may progress during pregnancy. Your kidney status could worsen. Women with diabetes are at higher risk for frequent and severe hypoglycemia (low blood glucose) during pregnancy because glucose crosses the placenta to provide nutrition for the growing baby. The pregnancy state also tends to allow diabetic ketoacidosis — a dangerous condition usually accompanied by very high blood glucose — to develop quickly. Having a thorough medical evaluation prior to pregnancy is extremely important for determining y Continue reading

Possible new view of diabetes

It's hard to change entrenched ideas in science.
Protein is the genetic material.
Genes are continuous and immobile.
The genome consists of 120,000 genes; no, 80,000; no, 60,000; no, 20,325.
What we know about the natural world changes as we learn more. That's why there's no such thing as scientific "proof," just evidence, hypotheses, and, rarely, enough findings to support a theory. Science is evidence-based, from observations and experiments. We don't "believe" in evolution or climate change as if it is a religion. Yet presenting evidence that challenges a long-held idea can be difficult for a researcher.
Bryon Petersen, PhD, director of the Pediatric Stem Cell Research and Hepatic Disorders Child Health Research Institute at the University of Florida is in the uncomfortable position of challenging dogma, knows that well. His findings suggest that type 1 diabetes (T1D) might not directly be autoimmune in origin, and that tracking blood glucose might not be the only way to manage the disease.
His team has just published a paper in the journal Laboratory Investigation, "Suppression of islet homeostasis protein thwarts diabetes mellitus progression," that puts a little-known molecule on the radar: islet homeostasis protein, aka IHoP.
People with type 1 diabetes make too much IHoP. Plus, experiments in mice and humans show that decreasing IHoP restores blood glucose control and increases the number of insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. Perhaps most importantly, excess IHoP is in the blood of patients, making it a possible new biomarker for T1D.
Anatomy of a pancrea Continue reading

Your Urine And Diabetes: What You Should Know

Paula’s story
Paula came to see mcomplaining that her urine smelt funny. She had been referred to through a friend who had diabetes, and who thought that I might be able to help Paula understand why her pee smelled funny.
“My friend told me my urine smells like diabetes,” said Paula. “She said she had that same fruity smell when she got diagnosed.”
Paula said her urine smelled like, “Sugar Smacks,” of all things. I suspected that Paula may have Type 2 Diabetes, but we needed to run some lab tests in order to confirm this suspicion
We tested her urine using a urinalysis. She had high levels of glucose in her urine. After the urinalysis, we ran a random blood sugar, which detected her levels at 798 mg/dL. With the results at hand, Paula was diagnosed with diabetes. She had to start on insulin seemingly right off the bat, as other oral medications wouldn’t control her diabetes. She had weight to lose, and goals to reach. While she’s a work in progress,her urine no longer smells like Sugar Smacks.
What exactly is urine made of ?
Urine is a clear, yellow liquid produced by the body to handle the wastes from normal body metabolism. When nitrogenous by-products build up in the blood from cellular metabolism, it must be cleared from the bloodstream.
In our bodies, some of our toxic waste from metabolism is excreted through perspiration as urea. The rest is handled by an intricate filter system that makes up the human urinary system.
The kidneys work through processes of filtering waste, reabsorption, and tubular secretion. They make urine through this complex filt Continue reading

Is cheese safe for people with diabetes?

Compared with many other foods, cheese is high in fat and calories and may not be an obvious choice for someone with diabetes. Cheese and diabetes can, however, be a healthful combination.
Cheese lovers can enjoy a wide variety of cheeses without elevating blood sugar, raising blood pressure, or gaining weight.
For diabetes-friendly meals or snacks, people should choose healthful cheeses and serve them with foods that are rich in fiber and low in calories.
Can people with diabetes eat cheese?
People with diabetes can safely eat cheese as part of a balanced, healthful diet. Just as with other foods, moderation is the key. A diet mainly consisting of cheese is unhealthy for anyone.
When selecting cheeses, people with diabetes need to consider a few things:
Calories
Cheese is very high in calories and fat. Though calorie content varies among cheese varieties, people with diabetes should avoid overindulging in cheese.
Type 2 diabetes is linked with obesity, and losing just a few pounds can reduce the risk of diabetes.
There are several steps that people with diabetes can take to help them eat cheese without gaining weight:
stick to small servings
choose lower-calorie cheeses
use cheese as a source of flavor rather than as the main course
Saturated fat
Cheese is high in saturated fat compared with many other foods. In small quantities, saturated fat is harmless and can actually be beneficial to the body. But excessive intake of saturated fats is linked to weight gain, high cholesterol, gallbladder problems, and heart disease.
The American Heart Association recommend a diet that Continue reading