The Top 20 Foods For Beating Diabetes

The Top 20 Foods for Beating Diabetes

Every time you roll your shopping cart into the supermarket, you’re making a decision that goes far beyond whether you’re going to have pork or pierogies for dinner. You’re actually choosing between being a victim and a victor. What you put in your cart goes a long way toward determining whether you’ll be compromised by diabetes or start controlling and eventually even beating it.
That’s why we’ve assembled the following list of the 20 best foods for fighting diabetes. Every time you go to the store from now on, take this list with you and check off each item. In fact, if your favourite store has a delivery service, sign up for it so your supplies are automatically replenished every few weeks.
Research proves that making a few key changes to your diet such as eating more produce, fewer refined carbohydrates, plenty of lean protein, and more ‘good’ fat’helps improve blood-sugar control and cuts the risk of diabetes-related complications. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that one or two or even five foods on this list will transform you. You need most of them, yes, even the flaxseed, because together they represent a new approach to eating, a lifestyle rather than just a diet.
1. Apples
Because they offer so many health advantages, put these at the core of your diet. Apples are naturally low in calories, yet their high fibre content (4 grams) fills you up, battles bad cholesterol, and blunts blood-sugar swings. Red Delicious and Granny Smith are also among the top 10 fruits with the most disease-fighting antioxidants.
Eat them whole and unpeeled for the Continue reading

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Drinking Wine Is Linked to a Lower Risk of Diabetes

TIME Health
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Drinking alcohol—especially wine—every few days may help protect against type 2 diabetes, suggests a new study published in the journal Diabetologia. People in the study who drank three to four days a week were about 30% less likely to develop diabetes than those who drank less than once a week.
This isn’t the first study to find a link between drinking moderately—having up to 7 drinks a week for women and up to 14 drinks a week for men—and a reduced diabetes risk, compared to not drinking at all. (Heavy drinking, however, is known to increase the risk of diabetes.)
For the new study, researchers analyzed data from more than 70,000 healthy Danish adults who were surveyed about their health and drinking habits around 2007. They tracked them for five years to see who developed type 2 diabetes.
People who had the lowest risk for diabetes were those who drank alcohol at moderate—and slightly more than moderate—levels. Men who drank 14 drinks a week had a 43% lower risk of diabetes than men who did not drink at all; women who drank nine drinks a week had a 58% reduced risk.
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The timing of those drinks also mattered. Drinking three to four days a week was linked to the biggest risk reduction. For women, very infrequent drinking (less than one day a week) was also associated with slightly lower diabetes rates, compared to being a lifetime abstainer.
“For the same total weekly amount of alcohol, sprea Continue reading

Drunk versus diabetes: How can you tell?

Dispatch calls your EMS unit to the side of a roadway, where police officers have detained a driver on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol intoxication. You find the female driver handcuffed in the back seat of a police cruiser. She is screaming profanities and hitting her head against the side window.
An officer tells you that she was weaving in and out of traffic at highway speed, and it took several minutes to pull her over. She was noncooperative and it took several officers to subdue her. She sustained a laceration to her head, which the officers want you to evaluate.
The woman continues to swear at you as you open the car door. You note that she is diaphoretic and breathing heavily. You can smell what appears to be the sour, boozy smell of alcohol, even though you are not close to her. You can see that the small laceration near the hairline on her right forehead has already stopped bleeding. Her speech is slurred and she appears to be in no mood to be evaluated. The police officers are ready to take her down to the station to be processed for driving under the influence.
Sound familiar? It should — this is a scene that is played out often in EMS systems. While it may seem initially that these incidents are not medical in nature, they really deserve close attention by the EMS personnel.
In this article we will focus on the challenges of evaluating a patient who is intoxicated versus a patient who is experiencing an acute diabetic emergency. There have been numerous instances where EMS providers have exposed themselves to serious liability secondary to Continue reading

Can You Reverse Diabetes?

Can you change your diabetes fate?
It's key to understand that type 2 diabetes is a progressive illness often preceded by years of elevated blood glucose (also known as blood sugar) levels high enough to be diagnosed as prediabetes. When most people with type 2 diabetes are finally diagnosed, experts believe they've been on this path for five to 10 years and have lost more than half of their natural insulin-making capability in the beta cells of their pancreas.
While you cannot undo your lifestyle habits of the last decade or more, you can take steps to put your diabetes in remission. Don't despair and don't give up.
Research shows that losing weight and keeping it off can help delay the onset of prediabetes, delay progression of prediabetes to type 2 diabetes, or slow the progression of type 2. The keys to diabetes prevention and preventing diabetes complications include: Eat healthfully, exercise often, seek out knowledge and support, and create an environment that fosters healthful living.
Losing even just a few pounds early on when glucose begins to rise can dramatically improve your blood sugar levels, cholesterol levels, triglycerides, blood pressure, and more.
"People should get to their ideal weight if they have prediabetes or type 2," says Robert Huizenga, M.D., associate professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles and doctor for The Biggest Loser, where he is known as Dr. H. "People should have no excess fat and be athletically fit. Ninety minutes of exercise six days a week and a steady diet of healthy eating is the best prescription to man Continue reading

Take Statins? What You Need to Know about Diabetes Risk

Statin medications (statins) are drugs that help lower cholesterol levels in the blood to help prevent coronary heart disease for those at risk or who already have experienced some form of cardiovascular disease. Statins do carry certain risks that need balanced and managed through ongoing physician monitoring. A recent study highlights how important it is to manage diabetes risk factors when taking statins.
New study examines statin-diabetes link
A higher than previously documented risk of Type 2 diabetes with statin use was recently reported in the journal Diabetologia. Various past studies have found a zero to 36 percent higher risk of developing diabetes while taking statins. An average risk of developing diabetes on statins is reported at approximately 9% in meta-analyses.
This latest study determined that men taking statins had a 46 percent higher risk of diabetes than those not on statins. Additionally, statin use was associated with a 24 percent reduction in insulin sensitivity and a 12 percent reduction in insulin secretion. Some previous studies evaluated fasting blood sugar, while this study applied more precise A1C and glucose tolerance tests.
Michael Rocco, MD, Medical Director of Cardiac Rehabilitation and Stress Testing, Section of Preventive Cardiology at Cleveland Clinic, reviewed the findings (he did not participate in the research). Dr. Rocco noted that the people who developed diabetes while taking statins were older, had a higher Body Mass Index (BMI), and a much higher incidence of cardiovascular disease.
“It does look like people who have increased Continue reading