Home
- Eating Well (or at Least Not terribly) at Fast Food Resturants
You can view the current or previous issues of Diabetes Health online, in their entirety, anytime you want.
Click Here To View
See if you qualify for our free healthcare professional magazines. Click here to start your application for Pre-Diabetes Health, Diabetes Health Pharmacist and Diabetes Health Professional.
Latest Weight Loss Articles
Diabetes and Weight Loss Article Archives
December 2012
There are ways to live with diabetes that allow for optimal health and relative freedom from complications. But to obtain them requires knowledge and know-how.
3 comments - Posted Dec 6, 2012
October 2012
According to a report by the inspector general of the US Department of Health and Human Services, dozens of purported weight-loss and immune-system supplements are illegally labeled and do not have appropriate scientific evidence to support their claims.
0 comments - Posted Oct 27, 2012
You don't have to live in San Francisco to participate in the annual Dance Out Diabetes dance-a-thon event.
1 comment - Posted Oct 15, 2012
When I became a type 2 diabetic, I wanted to find a way to manage my weight and blood sugar with diet and exercise. I tried the high carb diet recommended by my doctor and dietitian for a time. It worked wonderfully well while my blood sugar level was high, but when my blood sugar stabilized and I was able to go off medication, I started gaining weight again. The next thing I tried was low carbohydrate dieting. I found it to be a very effective way to lose weight rapidly, but I was unable to endure the regimen for more than a short time.
6 comments - Posted Oct 2, 2012
September 2012
The Mayo Clinic Health Letter for August 2012 has published three lifestyle changes that could stave off the progression of prediabetes to full-blown type 2 diabetes. The list isn't new, but its periodic reiteration indicates that healthcare researchers and providers have settled on a simple prescription for staying diabetes-free.
1 comment - Posted Sep 4, 2012
August 2012
We’ve all heard a lot of discussion about low carbohydrate diets and whether they are effective for weight loss and blood sugar control.. What most of us do not understand, however, is how diabetes affects the way that we process carbs. Beta cells make more than insulin: they also make another satiety hormone: amylin. If we are beta-cell deficient, then we are amylin-deficient as well. When the amylin hormone is not available to tell our brain that we are full, we crave more food, especially carbohydrates. Carbohydrates act as a mood stabilizer, making us feel good when we’re stressed.
1 comment - Posted Aug 31, 2012
June 2012
This is an open letter to marketers who target people with diabetes. From the point of view of a person with diabetes, marketers often make the following mistakes when promoting their products to us.
18 comments - Posted Jun 15, 2012
May 2012
A university study has concluded that a combination of metformin and rosiglitazone (Avandia) is the best drug therapy for controlling blood sugar levels in type 2 children and adolescents. Metformin alone is the drug most often prescribed for young or recently diagnosed type 2 patients.
0 comments - Posted May 24, 2012
The slow backlash against low-fat, relatively high-carb diets as the ideal for everyone with type 2 diabetes has received a boost from a team of Swedish researchers at Linkoping University, about 100 miles southwest of Stockholm.
1 comment - Posted May 20, 2012
April 2012
Food plays an important role in our lives. For most of us, it is more than just a means of sustenance. For some, it is a source of great pleasure. For others, it is a source of painful consequences. And for many, it is both.
0 comments - Posted Apr 29, 2012
Bariatric surgery, not medications, may be the key to producing dramatic drops in weight and even the remission of diabetes symptoms among type 2 patients, says a study from the University of Rome.
0 comments - Posted Apr 20, 2012
Just a 1 percent weight loss in older people with type 2 diabetes can improve their physical mobility by up to 7 percent, according to a new study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
0 comments - Posted Apr 16, 2012
March 2012
Long-term use of metformin as a weight loss aid is both safe and effective in preventing or delaying the onset of type 2 diabetes, says the Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group.
2 comments - Posted Mar 25, 2012
November 2011
A new diabetes-friendly sugar, proven to help reduce sugar absorption, will soon be added to popular breads and cereals. "Sugir" is real sugar that contains an all-natural, tasteless additive called Emulin. Emulin, a patented formulation of compounds found in fruits, prevents the body from absorbing about a third of ingested sugar. A previous study showed that Emulin blocks the absorption of sugar by more than 30 percent.
2 comments - Posted Nov 30, 2011
Carol Normadi is a licensed marriage and family therapist in Northern California who is co-founder of Beyond Hunger, Inc., a group dedicated to helping people overcome obsessive concerns with food. She has co-authored two books on the topic of food obsessions: "It's Not About Food: Ending Your Obsession With Food and Weight" (Putnam, 1998) and "Over It: A Teen's Guide to Getting Beyond Food and Weight" (New World Library 2001).
10 comments - Posted Nov 4, 2011
October 2011
Trying to lose weight as an insulin-injecting person with type 1 diabetes couldn't be more frustrating. It gets on my last nerve that exercise can trigger mind-numbing lows, lows that cause me to inhale a portion of those recently burned calories. That said, I don't skip exercise to avoid lows. I just check my blood sugars more often, use caution with my insulin dosing, and follow the advice of my doctors.
22 comments - Posted Oct 21, 2011
September 2011
Your dietitian is misleading you. That's the takeaway from an article published recently in the medical journal The Lancet. The rules of thumb that you've been given are wrong. And losing weight quickly and easily by cutting a few hundred calories a day just doesn't happen, scientists say.
3 comments - Posted Sep 18, 2011
July 2011
Erin lay on a bed in the emergency room, finally serious about getting help. Her second episode of diabetic ketoacidosis in a single year had sent her to the hospital shaking and vomiting. For the past seven years, she had been driven by one desire: to lose forty pounds. She refused to give herself her full dose of insulin, fearing weight gain. She hadn't seen her endocrinologist or checked her blood sugar for a year or two.
5 comments - Posted Jul 18, 2011
June 2011
Lap-Band manufacturer Allergan has asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to allow surgeries using the device on overweight teenagers as young as 14 years old.
3 comments - Posted Jun 27, 2011
April 2011
What is it about salt that brings out so many powerful flavors and strong feelings? Simple sodium chloride, or salt, as it's known to everyone but chemistry teachers, has been applied to food as a seasoning since the beginning of civilization. Unfortunately, the sodium in salt has proven dangerous both to diabetics and to healthy people who have a propensity toward heart disease.
1 comment - Posted Apr 26, 2011
As we wrote back in 2008, the EndoBarrier is a very clever way to simulate the effect of a gastric bypass without the unpleasant scalpel part. It looks like a long clear plastic stocking, and it's simply threaded through the patient's mouth and stomach, down to the small intestine, where it lines the intestine's upper section (the same part that is bypassed in traditional surgery). Food slips right through it, but digestive enzymes are trapped on its other side. The two don't get to join forces until a couple of feet further downstream, so the effect on diabetes is a lot like that of a bypass: It resolves the symptoms of type 2 diabetes.
0 comments - Posted Apr 1, 2011
March 2011
Michael Hamman is a 63-year-old contractor. He recalls, "I first was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes five or six years ago. I probably had elevated blood sugar well in advance of that, but I was unaware of it. I don't remember how high my blood sugar was at the time, but I think my A1C was 7.5%. My blood sugar's never really been awful. Since I started monitoring myself, my sugar readings are normally between 150 and 165. I think it was pushing 200 before I was medicated, but the medications brought it down. They started me on glyburide and I took that for a long time, and then the A1C was moving up again, so they added the metformin. The A1C now is down in the mid-sixes. They consider it controlled, not well controlled or as good as it could be, but certainly for someone my size, it's probably as good as you can get."
1 comment - Posted Mar 25, 2011
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has identified a swath of the southern U.S. as the country's "diabetes belt." In this region, made up of parts of 15 states, some 12 percent of the population has type 2 diabetes, compared with 8.5 percent of people in the rest of the country.
0 comments - Posted Mar 19, 2011
Tony Flores is a 50-year-old native of El Salvador who works as a construction foreman. He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes about 12 years ago, after an eye doctor told him it would be a good idea to get his blood sugar checked. He recalls, "I did the test, and they got all freaked out and told me, ‘Oh my god, your A1C is at 12%. You have diabetes type 2. You've got to cut the sugar, you've got to stop drinking orange juice and soda."
2 comments - Posted Mar 15, 2011
You know that awful feeling when a sugar low is coming. I break out into a cold sweat, feel panicky, get nauseated, and have trouble answering extremely simple questions like "Do you need to eat?" Well, I was feeling it again, and again, and I didn't know why. That's what I hate the most: When things go wrong, but I think I've been doing everything right.
2 comments - Posted Mar 8, 2011
February 2011
Ellen Granberg is an obesity sociologist who studies the processes that people go through when they lose weight and keep it off. As she says, "If the problem were that we don't know what people should eat to lose weight, that would be one thing, but we don't have that problem. There are a hundred weight loss plans out there that are perfectly good. We understand all about the physiology of weight loss maintenance and the metabolic impacts, but nothing about the social and emotional impacts. People who sustain weight loss over time move through a lot of different challenges."
1 comment - Posted Feb 27, 2011
In two recent head-to-head year-long trials, one testing gastric bypass surgery versus lap band surgery and another pitting gastric bypass surgery against sleeve gastrectomy, gastric bypass came out ahead with regard to resolving the symptoms of type 2 diabetes. Both studies were published in the February issue of the Archives of Surgery.
0 comments - Posted Feb 25, 2011
In order to undergo gastric bypass surgery, you must have a BMI of at least 35. If you have type 2 diabetes and would like to undergo the surgery to alleviate your diabetes symptoms, you are out of luck unless you are also morbidly obese. A few less weighty type 2 patients have taken matters into their own hands by deliberately gaining enough weight to qualify, but now there is a less drastic way to qualify for the operation.
0 comments - Posted Feb 23, 2011
High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is, as the name implies, corn syrup whose glucose has been partially changed into a different sugar, fructose. To make HFCS, you start with corn, then mill it to produce starch -corn starch. Starch, the most important carbohydrate in the human diet, consists of long chains of glucose. To make corn syrup, you mix the corn starch with water and then add an enzyme, produced by a bacterium, that breaks the starch down into shorter chains of glucose. Then you add another enzyme, produced by a fungus, that breaks the short chains down into glucose molecules. At that point, you have regular corn syrup.
1 comment - Posted Feb 17, 2011
Ever see the top 10 lists for foods everyone should eat to superpower your diet? Ever wonder which will mesh with your diabetes meal plan? Wonder no more. Your list of the top 10 diabetes superfoods has arrived.
0 comments - Posted Feb 7, 2011
Walmart, the nation's largest grocer, averages 20 million customers every single day, so their food policies can affect a lot of people. For one thing, researchers have linked part of the rise in obesity to the prevalence of cheaper food, and Walmart is famous for cheaper food.
0 comments - Posted Feb 7, 2011
Diva TalkRadio is an interactive, live internet talk-radio destination that focuses on issues and concerns of those living with, at risk of and affected by diabetes. Divabetic's founder and executive director, Max "Mr. Divabetic" Szadek serves as the resident host of DivaTalkRadio programs. This month, Mr. Divabetic shines the spotlight on Constance Brown-Riggs MSEd, RD, CDE, CDN. Constance is a Registered Dietitian-Certified Diabetes Educator and a National Spokesperson American Dietetic Association. Constance has been honored with the Diabetes Care and Education Practice Group (DCE) 2007 Diabetes Educator of the Year Award. Over the course of her career, Constance Brown-Riggs has established herself as an expert on the subject of nutrition, diabetes and the cultural issues that impact the health and health care of people of color. She is not only versed in the science of medical nutrition, but also has an active nutrition counseling practice through which she sees hundreds of patients. Her ability to translate her academic and clinical knowledge into clear, understandable terms have made her a nationally renowned, sought-after speaker, educator and author. She is passionate about creating opportunities to spread the word about health and nutrition, and developing educational tools which shorten the cultural distance between patients and caregivers. Every aspect of her work supports that mission
1 comment - Posted Feb 2, 2011
January 2011
DENVER -- New episodes of a critically acclaimed, locally-produced Spanish language soap opera will focus on the obesity crisis in hopes of helping viewers better understand what causes obesity and how they can live healthier lives. The soap opera is called "Encrucijada: Sin Salud, no hay Nada" ("Crossroads: Without Health, there is Nothing").
1 comment - Posted Jan 31, 2011
Taking 10,000 steps a day, or walking about five miles, is very, very good for you. It's even better than walking 3,000 steps a day, which is also extremely beneficial if you walk briskly enough to do it in 30 minutes. The 10,000 steps philosophy is not new--there's even a weight-loss book or two on the topic. But now the 10,000 step regimen has also been linked to an increase in insulin sensitivity in middle-aged adults.
1 comment - Posted Jan 20, 2011
Brown fat is an entirely different animal than the white fat that we pack onto our hips to store excess calories. Instead of storing energy, brown fat actually burns glucose to produce heat (thermogenesis). It's brown because it contains special mitochondria that produce heat from the glucose when activated by cold. Adults don't have much of it, unfortunately, just a few grams if we're lucky. If we had about 50 grams and were cold enough to activate it, it would actually burn about 500 calories a day.
0 comments - Posted Jan 14, 2011
Infopia USA's Eocene System is a diabetes management system with a data collection device that gathers data from a meter, blood pressure cuff, and a thermal scale. Readings are stored on Infopia's network and available to you and your health team. See the video on Diabetes Health TV here.
0 comments - Posted Jan 13, 2011
December 2010
Starting in February, Rhode Island's eight YMCAs will participate in JOIN, a 24-week research study on ways to help obese children and teenagers achieve healthier weight. If it meets its goals, it could become the prototype for a nationwide program that would have a direct effect on the treatment of pre-diabetes in children.
1 comment - Posted Dec 31, 2010
Arena Pharmaceuticals and Eisai Inc. recently released results of a phase 3 clinical trial for lorcaserin, a weight-loss drug they are developing in partnership. The trial, called BLOOM-DM (Behavioral modification and Lorcaserin for Overweight and Obesity Management- Diabetes Management), targeted patients with type 2 diabetes who are overweight or obese.
2 comments - Posted Dec 28, 2010
A 10-year study by Harvard University scientists found that diabetes puts people at risk for depression and that depression puts people at risk for type 2 diabetes. The two-way connection between the diseases was discovered in 55,000 nurses surveyed over the decade.
1 comment - Posted Dec 17, 2010
Obese lab rats that have undergone gastric bypass surgery to induce weight loss show a reduced desire for sugar water compared to obese rats that have not had the operation. Researchers at Penn State College of Medicine who observed that outcome also reported that the rats' preferences for salty, sour, or bitter tastes did not change. Lean rats who were given gastric bypass surgery as a control showed no changes in any of their taste preferences.
0 comments - Posted Dec 11, 2010
November 2010
It's a pretty common complaint heard in households around the country: "My tummy hurts." Parents and teachers have been battling this complaint for decades, with children insisting that they are in pain and having no explanation why.
0 comments - Posted Nov 8, 2010
For over 30 years, we have been told over and over by doctors, the media, nutritionists, and food companies that saturated fat is bad for us, causing us to gain weight and contributing to cardiovascular disease (CVD). It has led to a whole industry of low fat and non-fat food options, most claiming that saturated fat is bad for our health.
4 comments - Posted Nov 1, 2010
October 2010
Weight Watchers International, Inc., the world's leading provider of weight management services, and Merck, a global healthcare leader, announced today an innovative collaboration focused on fighting obesity. The two companies will launch an initiative in which Merck will provide physicians and other health care providers with educational information about the Weight Watchers® program and its underlying clinical evidence to assist doctors in addressing the ongoing weight management needs of their patients.
0 comments - Posted Oct 21, 2010
Michelle Obama recently announced that she plans to eliminate childhood obesity in a generation. If all goes according to her plan, childhood obesity will have dropped from the current rate of 32 percent to a rate of 5 percent by 2030. That rate of 32 percent translates to over 25 million obese children and adolescents, so a lot of attention has been given to examining the direct causes of childhood obesity, the factors that contribute, and the best ways to eliminate it altogether.
1 comment - Posted Oct 14, 2010
Earlier this year, First Lady Michelle Obama announced an ambitious goal: to erase childhood obesity within a generation. If she is successful, the childhood obesity rate will be only 5 percent by 2030, down from the current rate of 32 percent. Ambitious? Yes. Impossible? Not according to her plan.
1 comment - Posted Oct 13, 2010
Cutting back on sleep reduces the benefits of dieting, according to a study published Oct. 5 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
0 comments - Posted Oct 10, 2010
The holidays are known as a time for family gatherings, catching up with relatives, and sometimes even the occasional family conflict. Like drama at the holiday dinner table, in many ways your health is influenced by your family-for better or for worse. This year, why not start a conversation that benefits everyone? Gather your family health history.
0 comments - Posted Oct 4, 2010
September 2010
(HealthDay News) -- Think recess, and you'll probably smile. What wasn't to like about a break in the school day set aside for running and playing, for friends and fun? Now fast-forward to your adult life. What if your workplace started offering recess on the job?
0 comments - Posted Sep 30, 2010
I was reading the latest issue of one of my parenting magazines when I came across an article on children and food. The author suggested offering dessert only two to three times a week instead of every day. I laughed aloud.
0 comments - Posted Sep 18, 2010
Long-term weight loss may release into the blood industrial pollutants linked to illnesses like diabetes, hypertension and rheumatoid arthritis, researchers said on Tuesday. These compounds are normally stored in fatty tissues, but when fat breaks down during weight loss, they get into the blood stream, said lead researcher Duk-Hee Lee at the Kyungpook National University in Daegu in South Korea.
0 comments - Posted Sep 8, 2010
August 2010
(Reuters) - Genetic testing might have helped identify people who would become depressed or suicidal while taking Sanofi-Aventis' weight loss drug Acomplia, which might have helped keep the drug on the market, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
0 comments - Posted Aug 19, 2010
June 2010
It raises fasting blood sugars. It increases the risk for type 2 diabetes. Millions of people suffer from it. And many don't even know they have it.
1 comment - Posted Jun 30, 2010
There are so many weight loss programs out there, sometimes it is hard just to keep track of them, let alone choose one that will work. Add in the factor of diabetes, and the path to weight loss becomes harder to navigate and often contains land mines that we never even knew existed.
0 comments - Posted Jun 15, 2010
A Duke University Medical Center study has concluded that obese men who have type 2 diabetes are almost four times as likely to be diagnosed with high-grade prostate cancer during a prostate biopsy as men who do not have diabetes. When ethnicity is taken into account, obese white men run a five-times greater chance of being diagnosed with high-grade prostate cancer.
0 comments - Posted Jun 15, 2010
April 2010
A team of researchers from Case Western University published an article revealing their invention of a "smart" insulin molecule that binds considerably less to cancer receptors and self-assembles under the skin. To provide a slow-release form of insulin, the compound self-assembles under the skin by "stapling" itself together with zinc ions. Zinc staples connect the pieces of the insulin puzzle together to create a functional protein.
0 comments - Posted Apr 23, 2010
(Reuters) - A variant of an obesity gene carried by more than a third of the U.S. population also reduces brain volume, raising carriers' risk of Alzheimer's disease, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
0 comments - Posted Apr 19, 2010
YMCA of the USA, the nation's leading non-profit service organization dedicated to healthy living, and UnitedHealth Group, a diversified health and well-being company, today announced a partnership to reduce the burden of type 2 diabetes in the United States. In this first of its kind collaboration, UnitedHealth Group will reimburse YMCAs offering the YMCA's Diabetes Prevention Program.
2 comments - Posted Apr 16, 2010
February 2010
CHICAGO, IL - On Thursday, February 4, Oprah, Dr. Oz, Bob Greene, Art Smith, Dr. Ian Smith and more reveal the staggering human cost of the growing diabetes and pre-diabetes epidemic on a special episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Before a studio audience comprised of all diabetics and their families, Oprah and Dr. Oz reveal the latest facts and figures, share stories of those affected, and hold a no-holds-barred, revealing conversation about risk factors, diet and lifestyle.
17 comments - Posted Feb 4, 2010
Australian researchers who tracked the TV viewing habits of 8,800 people over a six-year span have some sobering statistics for people who love the tube too well: (1) If you watch TV more than two and up to four hours a day, your risk of dying from cardiovascular disease increases by 19 percent. (2) If your viewing habit is more than four hours a day, your risk of death from cardiovascular disease skyrockets by 80 percent.
4 comments - Posted Feb 4, 2010
A study commissioned by healthcare company Novo Nordisk has reported that the cost of diabetes and pre-diabetes to the U.S. economy in 2007 was $218 billion. The study, conducted by The Lewin Group, projected that by 2034, the two conditions will cost the economy $336 billion per year.
1 comment - Posted Feb 3, 2010
January 2010
Tampa, Fla. - On January 18, 2010, the Obesity Action Coalition (OAC) will launch a national weight and health awareness campaign aimed to encourage the American public to assess their weight and urge them to speak to their doctor about their weight. The goal of this campaign is to get the American public to start looking at weight and its impact on their health and the health of their loved ones.
1 comment - Posted Jan 12, 2010
Dear Diabetes Health, I hope you can help me. I am 49 years old and was diagnosed with type 2 five years ago. My husband still wants sex. I don't even want him to touch me. He is very mean to me. He yells at me and calls me names.
16 comments - Posted Jan 12, 2010
"People who give up smoking are prone to developing diabetes because they gain weight," TheTimes reported. It said a study has found that quitters are twice as likely as smokers, and 70% more likely than non-smokers, to have type 2 diabetes.
0 comments - Posted Jan 8, 2010
December 2009
Researchers at the Loyola University Medical Center near Chicago report that 20.7 percent of all American adults who have type 2 diabetes are "morbidly obese," a description that applies to people who are 100 or more pounds overweight. The researchers said that the figure for African Americans is even higher, with one out of three type 2s in that group falling under the definition of morbidly obese.
3 comments - Posted Dec 5, 2009
Fifty science and medical diabetes experts, representing 22 international organizations*, have issued a consensus statement that calls for bariatric surgery to be used as a treatment for type 2 diabetes. The statement, published online November 23 in the Annals of Surgery, is seen by attendees at the recent Diabetes Surgery Summit in Rome as the precursor to the establishment of a new medical discipline, "diabetes surgery."
2 comments - Posted Dec 4, 2009
"Fat is better in the butt than in the gut," in the words of Nancy Bohannon, MD, FACP, FACE, Director of the Clinical Research Cardiovascular Risk Reduction Program in San Francisco. Dr. Bohannon explained in a recent CA-AADE conference that fat is supposed to be subcutaneous. But when you have too much fat, your body has nowhere to put it, so it starts parking it where it doesn't belong-in the muscles or around the heart. This visceral fat, or belly fat, is the bad kind of fat, and it puts stress on the body and organs, including the heart.
0 comments - Posted Dec 1, 2009
November 2009
A study presented at the American Heart Association's 2009 Scientific Sessions said that eight percent of obese people misunderstand their body size and don't feel they need to lose weight.
3 comments - Posted Nov 30, 2009
NEW YORK (Nov. 23, 2009) - A first-of-its-kind consensus statement on diabetes surgery is published online today in the Annals of Surgery. The report illustrates the findings of the first international consensus conference - Diabetes Surgery Summit (DSS) - where an international group of more than 50 scientific and medical experts agreed on a set of evidence-based guidelines and definitions that are meant to guide the use and study of gastrointestinal surgery to treat type 2 diabetes. The document is considered to be the foundation of diabetes surgery as a medical discipline of its own.
1 comment - Posted Nov 27, 2009
HORSHAM, Pa.-- (BUSINESS WIRE)--Nutrisystem, Inc. (NASDQ: NTRI), a leading developer of weight loss products and services, today announced its company-wide support for the recently launched Stop DiabetesSM movement from the American Diabetes Association. On the heels of the successful launch of Nutrisystem D, its program designed to help people with type 2 diabetes lose weight, Nutrisystem has implemented a $5.00 contribution for every person who shares their story on the American Diabetes Association's Stop Diabetes website, up to $100,000 through December 31, 2009.
3 comments - Posted Nov 26, 2009
An ad in the November 15, 2009, edition of Parade magazine may be the opening salvo in a campaign to push adjustable gastric bands as a weight loss aid to help overweight type 2s dramatically improve their symptoms or even go into remission.
3 comments - Posted Nov 18, 2009
October 2009
LEXINGTON, Mass., October 27, 2009 - GI Dynamics, a leader in non-surgical treatments for type 2 diabetes and obesity, today announced data which support the safety and efficacy of the EndoBarrierTM Gastrointestinal Liner for pre-surgical weight loss treatment, along with a positive effect on glucose homeostasis in morbidly obese patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. According to the study, mean excess weight loss (EWL) achieved after 12 weeks post implantation was 19.0 % for EndoBarrier patients versus 6.9 % for control patients (p<0.002). The results of this European weight loss study were published today in the advance online publication of Annals of Surgery.
2 comments - Posted Oct 29, 2009
A recent and contentious meeting of diabetes experts at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes in Vienna, Austria, has continued the intense international debate over whether bariatric surgery should become a treatment for type 2 diabetes or continue to be reserved only for the extremely obese.
13 comments - Posted Oct 24, 2009
October 12, 2009. Philadelphia, Pa. - Children in Philadelphia who attended public schools and shopped at corner stores before or after school purchased almost 360 calories of foods and beverages per visit, according to new research published in the journal Pediatrics. Chips, candy and sugar-sweetened beverages were the most frequently purchased items. This is the first study to document both what foods and beverages children purchased in local corner stores on their way to and from school, and the nutritional content of those items.
0 comments - Posted Oct 15, 2009
The demise of Fen-phen dealt a body blow to hopes for an obesity pill that is actually effective. Unfortunately, the fen in Fen-phen, fenfluramine, caused grave pulmonary hypertension and heart valve problems. The phen part of the drug, though, was apparently just an innocent bystander. And now phen (phentermine) has resurfaced in a new pill that has posted some amazing results in Phase III clinical trials. Patients who were treated for 56 weeks with the new drug, Qnexa, lost an average of 14.7 percent of their weight, or 37 pounds.
8 comments - Posted Oct 7, 2009
September 2009
The way information is presented to us makes a big difference in whether we are able to integrate that information into our daily lives. Although graphs and numbers may sway some people, putting educational materials into a culturally relevant context can be more effective. A recent study, for example, has found that a dietary program based on the Medicine Wheel Model for Nutrition can change eating patterns among Native Americans, who have the highest rates of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease of all ethnic groups.
2 comments - Posted Sep 26, 2009
For most of us, the biggest problem with losing lots of weight is the demoralizing process of watching ourselves gain it all back. But some people who lose weight manage to keep it off for good. How do they do it? Researchers from the Miriam Hospital recently examined their brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging and actually saw their restraint in action.
1 comment - Posted Sep 25, 2009
Scientists have noted for a long time that the hormone leptin suppresses appetite. That's why they have been puzzled by the high levels of leptin found in obese people-shouldn't leptin decrease their appetites and act as a curb on their weight? Leptin also suppresses bone mass accrual, yet obese people do not suffer from loss or weakening of bone mass, despite their high leptin levels.
0 comments - Posted Sep 25, 2009
DAVIS, CA, SEPTEMBER 17, 2009 - While health officials have long suspected the link between obesity and soda consumption, research released today provides the first scientific evidence of the potent role soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages play in fueling California's expanding girth.
4 comments - Posted Sep 24, 2009
Even if they don't lose weight, a moderate aerobic exercise program can improve insulin sensitivity in obese adolescents who are sedentary.
4 comments - Posted Sep 23, 2009
Visceral adipose tissue (VAT), familiarly known as visceral fat, has long been associated with metabolic risk. But VAT is closely correlated with liver fat, also called intrahepatic triglyceride (IHTG) content. As a result, Samuel Klein of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, set out to determine if liver fat is more closely correlated with complications in obese patients than VAT.
0 comments - Posted Sep 12, 2009
Here's a sweet bit of news: Drinking sugar-free beverages sweetened with low-calorie sweeteners increases "dietary restraint," the ability of people to maintain long-term weight loss.
5 comments - Posted Sep 7, 2009
According to a recent Pennsylvania study, kids need to learn to control themselves when it comes to food. Obviously, self-control is important for us all, kids and adults alike, when it comes to weight management. It’s equally apparent that children need to be taught by their parents to make healthy food choices. But parents who strictly forbid their children to eat many foods might be contributing to a lack of self-control in their offspring, thereby creating the very chubbiness that they were trying to avert.
2 comments - Posted Sep 4, 2009
July 2009
Researchers at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, have found a brain enzyme that, when blocked, curbs appetite and increases energy levels-both crucial factors in controlling and losing weight.
0 comments - Posted Jul 25, 2009
For obese people, who often go on to develop type 2 diabetes, the magic bullet would be a drug that causes weight loss without surgery or the misery of drastic diets that often fail. So, news about a drug that produced dramatically slimmer lab rats in just a week should make them-and people with diabetes-perk up.
0 comments - Posted Jul 23, 2009
This article was submitted by GlaxoSmithKline, makers of LOVAZA, a medication to lower very high triglycerides, made from omega-3 fish oil.
0 comments - Posted Jul 16, 2009
Obesity has always been one of the major precursors to type 2 diabetes because of its ill effects on the body's ability to properly use insulin. But until now, scientists haven't been able to say with certainty just what happens in obese people to increase their insulin resistance.
0 comments - Posted Jul 14, 2009
June 2009
A surgeon who has been at the forefront of exploring bariatric surgery as a potentially curative treatment for type 2 diabetes is calling for it to be made accessible to more people.
5 comments - Posted Jun 23, 2009
Over the years, gastric bypass surgery has proven an effective means of controlling-and even reversing-type 2 diabetes in
"super-obese" patients (those with a body mass index of 50 or above; usually more than 200 pounds above ideal body weight).
5 comments - Posted Jun 10, 2009
Obese lab mice with severe type 2 diabetes had their blood glucose levels restored to normal and experienced a doubling in physical activity when sensitivity to the hormone leptin was restored to a portion of their hypothalamus.
3 comments - Posted Jun 9, 2009
May 2009
For generations, people have run hot and cold on the usefulness of vibrating exercise machines. There are plenty of comedy sketches in 1930s movies that portray overweight people being violently shaken around the midriff by a vibrating machine in the hope of strengthening their muscles and metabolizing fat. Those who have disdained such machines have reasoned that they substitute a mechanism's work for the work that exercisers should be doing themselves. After all, how can a machine do for you what you won't do for yourself?
2 comments - Posted May 28, 2009
Sometimes complex problems have simple answers. Take the alarming rise in obesity in the United States since 1970. Researchers have speculated in the past that the cause might be a combination of factors, perhaps a lack of exercise working in concert with the spread of cheap high-calorie junk food.
3 comments - Posted May 23, 2009
April 2009
Three studies just published in the New England Journal of Medicine have discovered that most adults have several grams of brown fat sequestered in little pockets on their necks and backs. It's a tiny amount, but it's big news because brown fat is not your everyday fat, the unwelcome white variety that stores calories and makes us hate mirrors. Brown fat is a busy little heat-producing fat that actually burns calories. It's brown because it contains special mitochondria, tiny factories within the fat cells that produce heat, lots of it, when activated by cold.
2 comments - Posted Apr 24, 2009
The following list shows 50 of the ways we have "convenienced" ourselves into diabesity. Before the technology boom, most Americans were active at work, at home, and at play. Much of what we did was manual, so we burned off the calories that we took in. When you consider that we did many of these activities on a regular basis, it is easy to see how we were able to remain trim. Obviously, no single one of these activities burns a large amount of calories by itself, but taken together, it is easy to see that the number of calories burned really begins to add up. (By the way, if you remember any of the things on this list, you don't have to tell anyone.)
12 comments - Posted Apr 23, 2009
Well, it's official: If you're elderly and fat, you're more likely to have problems getting around than if you're thin and elderly. A new study proves it. But here's the real kicker: If you're thin and elderly, but you used to be fat, you're more likely to develop problems getting around than people who were never fat. As a matter of fact, you're almost as likely to have mobility problems as people who are fat and elderly. Apparently, you just can't win for losing.
3 comments - Posted Apr 21, 2009
Diane Helms has spent most of her life struggling with her weight. She's tried just about every diet you can name and, despite them all, has watched the pounds pile on year after year.
0 comments - Posted Apr 8, 2009
A 12-month university study of 130 persons who ate either a USDA food pyramid-inspired high-carb diet or a diet moderately high in protein showed that members of the higher protein group lost 23 percent more weight and 38 percent more body fat than their high carb counterparts.
0 comments - Posted Apr 3, 2009
March 2009
The following is a Q&A with Judith Waldrop, who participated in Living Well, a week-long residential program designed for women with type 2 diabetes. The program is a joint effort of the healthy weight loss pioneers at Green Mountain at Fox Run and the Joslin Diabetes Center. This year, Living Well will take place April 19-25, 2009.
1 comment - Posted Mar 31, 2009
New cases of adult type 2 diabetes have increased by more than 90 percent in the past 10 years, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease and Prevention.(1) Equally troubling is the dramatic rise in type 2 diabetes among children. Recent reports reveal a 200 percent increase in hospitalizations for children with type 2 diabetes, a condition that was rarely diagnosed in children decades ago.(2) In the words of the CDC, "Diabetes is common, disabling, and deadly."(3)
2 comments - Posted Mar 18, 2009
The old joke has a man going to the doctor and saying, "It hurts when I do this. What should I do to make it go away?"
6 comments - Posted Mar 12, 2009
A few years ago a young man named Jeff came into my office seeking help to lose weight. He was 5'10" tall and weighed 130 pounds. Jeff denied starving himself, denied making himself throw up, and denied over-exercising. I tried to convince him that he was actually 30 pounds underweight. As I looked for the most effective ways of motivating him to restore his health, he brought up the fact that he had type 1 diabetes. Jeff said that he rarely gave himself insulin and that he had "diabulimia." I had never heard of diabulimia and had no idea what I was dealing with. I gave him a list of clinicians and asked him to call me back after he made appointments with an endocrinologist and a psychotherapist.
14 comments - Posted Mar 3, 2009
January 2009
The appearance of professional football player William "Refrigerator" Perry used to bother me. It was clear that he had been encouraged to get really big, and I worried about all that extra weight he carried. There were others almost as heavy, of course, but the Fridge was especially likable-he had charisma and an obvious sense of humor. (For fun, he once boxed 7-foot, 7-inch super-skinny former NBA player Manute Bol. He even entered the 2003 Nathan's Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest, coming in about 40 hot dogs behind the winner.) I worried about his health.
0 comments - Posted Jan 28, 2009
Remember that New Year's resolution that you made a few weeks ago? Oh yeah, that one. How's that going? If you're like most people, you may have started to slack off just a little bit. Or even worse, maybe it's already a distant memory. No worries, I won't tell. Let's get you going again.
1 comment - Posted Jan 27, 2009
Hearts in the medical community beat with considerable excitement at the discovery of leptin in 1994. A hormone produced by fat, leptin has a very useful talent: it tells the brain when to stop eating. So hopes were high that leptin would become the basis of an anti-obesity treatment. What could be simpler than to dose an obese person with a hormone that says, "You're not hungry any more, and you want to stop eating."
0 comments - Posted Jan 22, 2009
Current thinking has it that obese people are obese because they engage in less physical activity and burn fewer calories than their thinner counterparts. But suppose you could show that obese women burn just as many calories as their thinner, supposedly fitter counterparts?
0 comments - Posted Jan 21, 2009
According to biologists at the Baylor College of Medicine, limiting the copies of a gene that produces a protein affecting organ development serves to decrease fat cell size in mice, enhance their responsiveness to insulin, and increase their energy level.
0 comments - Posted Jan 14, 2009
About half of young people who have diabetes report having tried to lose weight at one time or another, says a Kaiser Permanente Southern California study reported in the December 2008 issue of Diabetes Care.
4 comments - Posted Jan 6, 2009
Researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong report that having metabolic syndrome may raise the risk of chronic kidney disease in people with type 2 diabetes.
1 comment - Posted Jan 6, 2009
Type 1.5 diabetes, also known as Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults (LADA), is an autoimmune disease that falls between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes because it has characteristics of both.
11 comments - Posted Jan 6, 2009
In a recent study, obese teens with type 2 diabetes who underwent gastric bypass surgery not only lost a third of their weight, but also experienced the complete remission of their disease.
4 comments - Posted Jan 6, 2009
December 2008
Post-menopausal women hoping to avert type 2 diabetes stand a better chance of success if they rely on losing weight rather than on a low-fat diet, according to results of a 12-year study conducted by the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
3 comments - Posted Dec 29, 2008
Next week we'll publish a great article written by Dr. Richard Bernstein. MD. Dr. Bernstein is a long-term proponent of paying more attention to carbs rather than fats (though he certainly doesn't advocate that you can have all the fats you want!) While Dr. Bernstein has been telling us about the benefits of low carb for over 30 years, there is still much skepticism about his (and many other's-Gary Taubes, anyone?) low carb results. The establishment has been slow to be convinced, despite the many research trials that back up their findings.
6 comments - Posted Dec 2, 2008
November 2008
No doubt about it: Most of us have never felt less in control of our destinies. The stock market is bottoming out and no one knows what to do about it. Jobs are down, food prices are up, and who knows what's going on with gas. To make things even more expensive, the holidays are upon us. Mix all these factors together, and you have a recipe for runaway stress and anxiety. But there is one thing you can control: your body weight. That's right. Now is the time to get fit, lose any extra pounds that might be hanging around, and develop the habits that will keep your weight at a healthful level over the long term.
1 comment - Posted Nov 24, 2008
With more than 2,500 facilities serving 10,000 communities that run the gamut from big-city downtowns to small rural sites, the YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association) could turn out to be a powerful tool in the fight to prevent diabetes.
1 comment - Posted Nov 17, 2008
October 2008
In gastric bypass surgery, the surgeon basically lops your small intestine in two and then hooks it back up again in such a way that it's much shorter than before. With the first section of your small intestine out of commission, food flows directly from your stomach to the middle of your small intestine. When less intestine is available to absorb food, less food is absorbed, not surprisingly. It works, but it's not pretty.
3 comments - Posted Oct 20, 2008
Orexigen Therapeutics has announced that the investigational weight loss drug Contrave (naltrexone SR/bupropion SR) reduced the prevalence of metabolic syndrome, which is associated with an increased risk of diabetes and heart disease, by 50 percent.
1 comment - Posted Oct 13, 2008
September 2008
I remember the call from the doctor's office two weeks after a long overdue annual physical. I sat in the examining room expecting to hear the usual "lose weight" diagnosis. I had been feeling tired and had been making more than a few daily trips to the bathroom. But in spite of the fact that my grandmother, father, cousin, and brother all suffered from type 2 diabetes, I was not prepared for my doctor's stern warning: My sugar had been totally out of control for several months. I needed to adjust my diet and lifestyle immediately. I was a 40-year-old chocoholic and totally calorie clueless. I also weighed 255 pounds. The doctor prescribed an oral medication and told me that monthly visits for testing would now be required. I thought, OK, I can do this.
1 comment - Posted Sep 18, 2008
With 21 million U.S. residents now officially diagnosed as having diabetes, healthcare professionals are looking at another statistic that is causing them many a sleepless night: The Centers for Disease Control estimate that there are 57 million people with pre-diabetes in the United States. (Pre-diabetes is defined as impaired fasting glucose of 100 to 125 mg/dl, impaired glucose tolerance of 140 to 199 mg/dl, or both.)
6 comments - Posted Sep 4, 2008
August 2008
Byetta has had a tough past few days. A lawsuit by a Virginia man alleges that the drug caused his life-threatening bout of severe pancreatitis, and there are rumblings from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that it may force Byetta's makers to attach a "black box" warning to its container and packaging-a stern, highlighted caution about potentially dangerous, even fatal, side effects.
19 comments - Posted Aug 28, 2008
Imagine someone pressing a pillow over your face while you sleep. You wake up and struggle for air. After 10 seconds, you're allowed to breathe again. But pretty soon, the pillow goes back over your face.
2 comments - Posted Aug 28, 2008
June 2008
When you have diabetes, you make the acquaintance of a lot of high-tech tools to help you manage it: monitors, meters and pumps. One very handy tool that sometimes gets overlooked is a digital scale for weighing and analyzing the nutritional content of food.
1 comment - Posted Jun 19, 2008
Dear friends of Diabetes Health,
We value your hard-earned diabetes wisdom and we want you to share it with the world! Please join us as a professional or lay diabetes advisor in one of our Diabetes Health website content Rooms.
3 comments - Posted Jun 6, 2008
May 2008
Dear Diabetes Health,
I appreciated Jamie Bailes’ (April/May 2008) article on helping overweight kids. To me, it illustrated the complexity of weight regulation and the folly of linking it to one factor (fat).
2 comments - Posted May 30, 2008
Teenage obesity is a growing problem. Not only does it make teens susceptible to type 2 diabetes, but it's also very hard on the teens themselves, who are often bullied or ostracized because of their weight. What can a doctor do when a teen can't seem to lose weight with diet and exercise?
8 comments - Posted May 22, 2008
April 2008
It’s late October, 2007, and Prof. Wendy Coleman has just learned about a competition called the Bayer Dream Fund. Coleman, a type 2 who was diagnosed in 2005, has been told that the fund grants a large cash award to the competition winner – money the winner can use to fund a personal project designed to spread the word about managing and living successfully with diabetes.
4 comments - Posted Apr 10, 2008
March 2008
I am a diabetic and was taking four insulin shots per day and still had problems with my sugar. I did two months of research on the Web because I had to find a way to get off the shots. I hate needles I was astonished at what I found on natural herbs!
38 comments - Posted Mar 19, 2008
NEW YORK – Growing evidence shows that surgery may effectively cure type 2 diabetes – an approach that not only may change the way the disease is treated, but that introduces a new way of thinking about diabetes.
18 comments - Posted Mar 13, 2008
What is the secret of effective weight management? When a person develops type 2 diabetes, this is a critical question. Losing weight is one of the most successful ways of dealing with this disorder. This is the challenge that I faced when I diagnosed as diabetic about 15 years ago.
2 comments - Posted Mar 6, 2008
January 2008
A new world-first study by Monash University researchers has found gastric banding surgery has a profound impact on one of society's biggest health issues - diabetes.
1 comment - Posted Jan 23, 2008
December 2007
David Bradley, age 44, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1991. A talented artist who recently went on the pump, he expresses his experiences with diabetes through his multimedia art.
1 comment - Posted Dec 1, 2007
November 2007
I learned that I had type 2 diabetes in February 1994. A dozen years later, I knew I had to make a change. Technically speaking, I was "morbidly obese." I'm tall - 6 feet, 2½ inches - but I tipped the scales at 312 pounds and had a body mass index (BMI) of 40.
7 comments - Posted Nov 28, 2007
In a recent 35-page report, two economists attempted to explain why we're all getting fatter. First, relative to consumer goods as a whole, the price of a calorie has dropped by 36 percent since 1977.
2 comments - Posted Nov 19, 2007
The word leptin comes from the Greek word leptos, meaning thin. A hormone produced by fat cells, it binds to a spot in the brain known as the satiety center, thereby announcing to the brain that the body has had enough to eat, that plenty of energy is stored in the fat, and that there is no need to eat any more right now. In short, its effect on the brain is to reduce appetite.
0 comments - Posted Nov 9, 2007
El Paso, Texas, October 31, 2007 - Diabetes has become the leading cause of death in Mexico and the third-leading cause of death among those living along the U.S. side of the border, according to a new study presented today by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).
1 comment - Posted Nov 2, 2007
October 2007
Human adenovirus-36 (AD-36) is an unwelcome visitor already because it causes colds, infections like pink-eye, and small intestine inflammation.
0 comments - Posted Oct 27, 2007
Whether or not you get fat is not the critical factor in developing type 2 diabetes, according to a recent mouse study by Texas researchers; instead, it's where that fat is packed away.
1 comment - Posted Oct 16, 2007
Symlin, or pramlintide, is synthetic amylin, a natural hormone that slows stomach emptying and leads to a feeling of fullness. Currently Symlin is used to dampen blood sugar rises in people with diabetes, but it's showing potential as a weight loss drug as well, according to a recent study.
1 comment - Posted Oct 12, 2007
September 2007
Fat deep inside your abdomen, called visceral fat, collects and clusters around your vital organs. From there, it sends out proteins and hormones that are associated with type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.
0 comments - Posted Sep 23, 2007
Studies of rats, those ever-useful creatures, have already shown that a fatty heart accompanies obesity and type 2 diabetes. Furthermore, the heart fat produces toxins that cause heart cell death and then heart failure.
0 comments - Posted Sep 20, 2007
Two large studies, both published in the New England Journal of Medicine, have just confirmed that if you're obese, weight loss surgery can make you live longer. A Swedish study tracked about 4000 obese people, about half of whom had undergone gastric bypass or lap band surgery.
0 comments - Posted Sep 7, 2007
An Australian review of six short clinical trials has found that low glycemic diets (which involve eating foods that raise blood sugar slowly instead of quickly) cause about two pounds more weight loss than calorie-restricted diets.
3 comments - Posted Sep 4, 2007
August 2007
Visceral fat (fat around your internal organs) is associated with insulin resistance and cardiovascular risk, but it's hard to measure without using fancy imaging techniques.
0 comments - Posted Aug 21, 2007
There are plenty of corporate weight-loss programs around, but Lite For Life is a weight loss program with a difference: Its philosophy is based upon the work of Seale Harris, a diabetes pioneer who discovered hyperinsulinism (excess secretion of insulin related to insulin resistance) in 1924.
3 comments - Posted Aug 20, 2007
America is fat now, but we'll be even fatter later. According to a meta-analysis of twenty studies and four national surveys, 75 percent of us will be overweight, and 41 percent of those will be downright obese, by the year 2015. Even our children, nearly a quarter of them, will be overweight or obese by then.
0 comments - Posted Aug 18, 2007
A French study, recently published in Diabetes Care, tracked the effects of swelling and shrinking waistlines on risk of developing metabolic syndrome (often considered a precursor of type 2 diabetes).
0 comments - Posted Aug 12, 2007
July 2007
Stressed mice get fat, according to a study out of Georgetown University Medical Center. And now they know the mechanism that does it; in fact, they can manipulate that mechanism to make the mice fat, or they can block the mechanism and keep the mice from getting fat no matter how stressed they may be.
0 comments - Posted Jul 31, 2007
According to a new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, obesity is socially contagious, spreading from person to person within a social network. If your friend becomes obese, your odds of becoming obese go up 57 percent. And if your portly friend considers you a friend as well, your odds of becoming equally plump rise 171 percent.
0 comments - Posted Jul 26, 2007
This book chronicles one woman's lifestyle change and how her journey ignited a popular movement called the "Meltdown" that brought an entire county together in a community-wide weight loss experience.
0 comments - Posted Jul 24, 2007
On one hand, GlaxoSmithKline really, really wants you to take their new over-the-counter diet pill, alli. On the other hand, they don't want you to abandon healthy habits in favor of pill popping.
0 comments - Posted Jul 15, 2007
Obese eighteen-year-old boys with a body mass index between thirty and 35 have a one in two chance of developing diabetes later in life. The odds are even a bit worse for obese young women. These were the dismal findings of a study just published in Diabetes Care using data from the National Health Interview Survey of 780,694 people between 1997 and 2004.
0 comments - Posted Jul 7, 2007
Dishware is destiny, according to new research just published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. There exists a plate that has just been scientifically proven to cause weight loss. And it's a mighty cute little piece of pottery to boot.
0 comments - Posted Jul 6, 2007
June 2007
Bariatric Surgery isn't just for weight loss anymore. It's been shown to be possibly curative of type 2 diabetes even in the absence of major weight loss following the surgery. Here's the rundown on how it works.
0 comments - Posted Jun 28, 2007
As many of us know to our dismay, the desire to chow down fatty, sugary food can be very strong indeed. In a recent six-week study of 88 obese, non-diabetic men and women, Symlin, a synthetic hormone currently used to dampen diabetic blood sugar swings, was found to dampen those very desires.
1 comment - Posted Jun 27, 2007
May 2007
Bariatric surgery, formerly used only for treating obesity, is being explored as a cure for type 2 diabetes in normal weight or moderately overweight people.
1 comment - Posted May 19, 2007
Overweight and insulin resistance may contribute to LADA, a form of type 1 diabetes, according to results of a study by Dr. Sofia Carlsson and her fellow researchers from Stockholm.
0 comments - Posted May 7, 2007
The 21st century may be remembered as the time when diabetes became a worldwide epidemic. However, it may also be known as the time when the disease was cured.
8 comments - Posted May 3, 2007
April 2007
If food groups were sporting leagues, carbs would be the NFL. You've got your low carb teams, your high carb vegan teams, and your middling carb teams—and each team believes that truth is on its side.
0 comments - Posted Apr 24, 2007
Carbs and carbs alone, not fat, increase body weight. It doesn't matter whether the carbs are from sugar, bread, fruit, or vegetables: They’re all rapidly digested and quickly converted to blood glucose. A short time after a carb-rich meal, the glucose in your bloodstream rises rapidly, and your pancreas produces a large amount of insulin to take the excess glucose out.
27 comments - Posted Apr 24, 2007
Remember the big picture: Populations that stick to traditional high-carbohydrate diets (for example, Asian rice-based diets) typically have low rates of obesity and diabetes. When they abandon traditional rice-based diets in favor of meatier Western fare, carbohydrate intake falls, but weight problems and diabetes increase.
4 comments - Posted Apr 24, 2007
When I developed diabetes in 1946, physicians thought that the high illness and death rate of diabetics was due to dietary fat and the supposedly resultant elevation of serum cholesterol. Since the DCCT trial, the scientific literature overwhelmingly supports the role of elevated blood sugar in all long-term diabetic complications.
3 comments - Posted Apr 24, 2007
Let’s be realistic and take a long-term perspective in this “which diet is best” debate, rather than wasting time quibbling over extremes—from low-carb to vegan. You’ll have type 2 diabetes for the rest of your life, and you’ll likely struggle with weight management throughout your life as well. The major challenge in weight loss, and even more so in weight maintenance, is long-term adherence.
13 comments - Posted Apr 24, 2007
Ah, the good life. Dining out, shopping for clothes, dining out, shopping for clothes, dining out, shopping…wait a minute. Is there a pattern here? Americans are eating out more and more, and leading researchers say that’s a big part of why so many of us are overweight. The biggest part of that big part? Big portions–Portion Distortion!
0 comments - Posted Apr 18, 2007
It’s well known that depression is not good for your sugar numbers and that alleviation of depression is accompanied by improved glucose control. The question has been whether the improvement is due to body weight reduction and better self-care, or whether it might be partially due to healing of the depression condition itself, independent of the aforementioned two factors.
0 comments - Posted Apr 17, 2007
March 2007
GlaxoSmithKline announced in February 2007 that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved orlistat for over-the-counter use. It’s been christened “alli,” and it contains 60 mg of orlistat, as opposed to the prescription form, Xenical, which contains 120 mg of orlistat.
0 comments - Posted Mar 31, 2007
Are ketones a healthy or an unhealthy sign?
Ketones in the urine can be a danger sign if your blood sugar is too
high and insulin levels are too low. It can indicate acidosis, an
abnormal condition usually occurring in people with out of control
type 1 diabetes requiring immediate medical attention. Ketones can
also occur because of other metabolic conditions.
0 comments - Posted Mar 1, 2007
February 2007
The diabetes research community was knocked on its ear when findings were published stating that any efforts to reduce the risk of developing type 2 should start with weight reduction.
0 comments - Posted Feb 1, 2007
Researchers in Finland are advising parents that excess weight gain during infancy increases the risk of impaired glucose tolerance and type 2.
0 comments - Posted Feb 1, 2007
December 2006
University of Pittsburgh researchers say that moderate weight loss improves arterial stiffness in people with type 2 diabetes.
0 comments - Posted Dec 1, 2006
October 2006
‘You wouldn’t believe how much I ate. Every night, besides dinner, I ate one of those big poppers full of popcorn with lots of butter and salt on it.”
0 comments - Posted Oct 1, 2006
September 2006
Reducing Inner Body Fat Is the Key to Metabolic Improvement After Weight Loss
0 comments - Posted Sep 1, 2006
The amount of inaccurate or even misleading information that is passed off as fact among many people regarding lower-carb lifestyles still surprises me.
0 comments - Posted Sep 1, 2006
Weight-Loss Books Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution: The Complete Guide to Achieving Normal Blood Sugars, by Richard K. Bernstein, MD (Little Brown, 2003)
0 comments - Posted Sep 1, 2006
August 2006
Byetta, which came on the market last year, was developed to help people with type 2 diabetes who weren’t getting adequate blood glucose control using other drugs. Any associated weight loss was only incidental.
16 comments - Posted Aug 1, 2006
“I can bend over and paint my own toenails now,” says Annie, who had bariatric surgery on February 5, 2005.
0 comments - Posted Aug 1, 2006
“The 7 Step Diabetes Fitness Plan: Living Well and Being Fit With Diabetes, No Matter Your Weight” (Marlowe & Co., 2006) is the book I hoped would be there for me one day if I were to be diagnosed with pre-diabetes.
0 comments - Posted Aug 1, 2006
July 2006
The mantra of healthcare professionals when talking about weight loss is plain and simple: Eat less and exercise more. The dream of many people who are overweight or obese would be to simply inject something that would help them to do just that.
0 comments - Posted Jul 1, 2006
For Ed, diabetes wasn’t only a wake-up call—it was an alarm clock.
0 comments - Posted Jul 1, 2006
June 2006
You’ve heard it a thousand times: If you want to lose weight, eat less and exercise more. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But in reality, it’s not.
0 comments - Posted Jun 1, 2006
Clare Rosenfeld and her mother Kari first conceived the idea that has resulted in a global campaign to pass a United Nations Resolution on diabetes. The International Diabetes Federation (IDF) has taken up the challenge and is leading the campaign.
0 comments - Posted Jun 1, 2006
May 2006
This month, we hear from Rachel, who will tell us about the process she is going through right now.
0 comments - Posted May 1, 2006
April 2006
U.K. researchers say there is an association between obesity and the consumption of soft drinks.
0 comments - Posted Apr 1, 2006
Ernest had high triglycerides and his blood glucose was rising. He thought he was doing all right, so you can imagine what he thought when I recommended that he increase the amount of fat and protein in his diet and decrease his carbohydrate intake.
0 comments - Posted Apr 1, 2006
March 2006
Dennis Robinson, a University of Missouri economist, says, “Give me a challenge, make it make sense, and I can do almost anything. That’s how I could lose 60 pounds and keep it off, and even take insulin.”
0 comments - Posted Mar 1, 2006
February 2006
For Deb it was a vicious circle. She was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes 33 years ago at age 20. It was four weeks before her marriage. You can imagine the stress she endured at that time. “I have lived on a diabetes rollercoaster ever since, until about eight months ago,” she says.
0 comments - Posted Feb 1, 2006
January 2006
You may not believe it by looking at me now, but I have weight issues. I’ve had them since I was a child. I’m telling you this because I know it’s hard to relate to someone who tries to help you with your weight problems if that person is not overweight herself.
0 comments - Posted Jan 1, 2006
October 2005
According to a recent study, soy-based meal replacement plans (MRs) yield greater weight loss and better blood glucose control than American Diabetes Association-recommended individualized diet plans (IDPs).
0 comments - Posted Oct 1, 2005
Eating yogurt in place of other foods can be a boon to weight loss, conclude Tennessee researchers who designed a study to compare potential antiobesity benefits from increased dietary calcium compared to other calcium sources.
0 comments - Posted Oct 1, 2005
September 2005
Diabetes duration and A1C remain the gold standard for determining whether you may develop retinopathy and neuropathy. However, if you are a type 1 with a weight problem, you may not be slowing down the progression to these microvascular complications.
0 comments - Posted Sep 1, 2005
August 2005
Louisiana researchers say that controlling the size of your food bites significantly reduces food and caloric intake.
0 comments - Posted Aug 1, 2005
May 2005
Improved glucose control helps you metabolize food more efficiently. Prior to pump use, you may have lost glucose in the urine. If so, those were calories you did not have available to maintain a normal weight. Was your A1C higher before pump therapy? If your A1C has improved, then you are using the nutrients in your food and losing less of them.
0 comments - Posted May 1, 2005
April 2005
Carbohydrate counting and new sugar substitutes, food products and medications have given people with diabetes an array of strategies and resources to help them manage their blood glucose. However, for some people, following a structured diabetes meal plan may not work.
0 comments - Posted Apr 1, 2005
March 2005
Last year, Stacey Martin, a 41-year-old real estate agent from East Hampton, New York, was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. At 270 pounds, the medical community considered her “morbidly obese.”
8 comments - Posted Mar 1, 2005
February 2005
Do you struggle to lose weight and keep it off? If so, the lessons learned by researchers at the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR) can help you meet your goals.
0 comments - Posted Feb 1, 2005
December 2004
Low-fat, high-fiber diets promoted weight loss in patients with type 2 diabetes without causing unfavorable alterations in plasma lipids or blood glucose control.
0 comments - Posted Dec 1, 2004
November 2004
What is the difference between fat body mass and lean body mass?
0 comments - Posted Nov 1, 2004
August 2004
Sibutramine (Meridia) is well tolerated by most patients and considered to be a safe drug. It has been shown to promote successful weight loss in most patients.
0 comments - Posted Aug 1, 2004
July 2004
Obese adults who increase their dietary calcium while adhering to a diet lose more weight than those on a similar diet who don’t take additional calcium.
0 comments - Posted Jul 1, 2004
June 2004
Waist circumference (WC), not only body mass index (BMI), indicates obesity-related health risk.
0 comments - Posted Jun 1, 2004
As we age, we tend to get heavier, weaker, slower and more prone to injury, disability and chronic disease.
1 comment - Posted Jun 1, 2004
“In a restaurant setting, increasing the size of an entrée results in increased energy intake,” say Pennsylvania State University researchers. “These results support the suggestion large restaurant portions may be contributing to the obesity epidemic.”
0 comments - Posted Jun 1, 2004
Consumption of portion-controlled food results in weight and fat loss, according to University of Illinois researchers.
0 comments - Posted Jun 1, 2004
The next time you see or hear an ad claiming that some dietary supplement will help you lose 10 pounds in two days, take it with a grain of salt.
0 comments - Posted Jun 1, 2004
May 2004
On the same day that the U.S. government was lamenting the news that obesity has caught up with smoking as a leading killer of Americans, a study demonstrated that a pill may help people quit smoking and lose weight at the same time.
0 comments - Posted May 1, 2004
Would you believe the two leading killers in the United States are lifestyle choices? It’s true.
0 comments - Posted May 1, 2004
Larger leg fat mass is associated with lower glucose levels and may be protective against disturbed glucose metabolism, particularly in women.
0 comments - Posted May 1, 2004
April 2004
It’s a good bet that the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse didn’t have to worry about body-fat composition, considering all the tea drinking they did in “Alice in Wonderland.”
0 comments - Posted Apr 1, 2004
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) slapped administrative penalties in December 2003 against three companies that “falsely claimed their products [caused] substantial weight loss without dieting or exercise.”
0 comments - Posted Apr 1, 2004
March 2004
Researchers in the United Kingdom studied whether increased body weight was also associated with earlier presentation of type 1 diabetes.
0 comments - Posted Mar 1, 2004
A low-calorie diet that includes almonds may have a “potential role” in fighting the obesity epidemic.
0 comments - Posted Mar 1, 2004
Eating a low-fat diet that includes the controversial fat substitute olestra (Olean) produced improvement in cardiovascular risk factors in a recent study—an effect largely explained by the participants’ weight loss.
0 comments - Posted Mar 1, 2004
February 2004
Healthcare professionals have a general bias against overweight people, Yale University researchers have discovered.
0 comments - Posted Feb 1, 2004
I’m not a diet doctor, but I can help you lose weight. A lot of it. In less time than you’d ever think was possible. The secret is a revolutionary new diet I developed while working with overweight men and women who visited my cardiology practice in Miami.
0 comments - Posted Feb 1, 2004
Suddenly it seems that sugar-free products are everywhere.
0 comments - Posted Feb 1, 2004
In October 2003, the North American Association for the Study of Obesity held its conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Here we provide summaries of some of the more interesting research presented at the conference.
0 comments - Posted Feb 1, 2004
Have you had type 2 diabetes for less than five years? Do you want to lose approximately 30 percent of your body weight?
0 comments - Posted Feb 1, 2004
April 2003
"We don't use them anymore," said my certified diabetes educator when I asked for a copy of the exchange lists used for meal planning.
0 comments - Posted Apr 1, 2003
"Nobody is forced to eat at McDonald's," a federal judge said as he threw out a class-action lawsuit that blamed McDonald's food for causing obesity, diabetes and other health problems in children.
0 comments - Posted Apr 1, 2003
We don't use them anymore," said my certified diabetes educator (CDE) when I asked for a copy of the exchange lists used for meal planning.
0 comments - Posted Apr 1, 2003
March 2003
On January 1, 2003, researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report on the state of America's waistlines.
0 comments - Posted Mar 1, 2003
February 2003
In today's busy world, it's difficult enough for most of us to get a meal on the table at all—let alone follow a healthy meal plan every day.
2 comments - Posted Feb 1, 2003
A gene said to cause obesity in humans has reportedly been discovered, according to an October 29, 2002, news release from Myriad Genetics, Inc., a company based in Salt Lake City, Utah.
0 comments - Posted Feb 1, 2003
A gene said to cause obesity in humans has reportedly been discovered, according to an October 29, 2002, news release from Myriad Genetics, Inc., a company based in Salt Lake City, Utah.
0 comments - Posted Feb 1, 2003
January 2003
Measuring body mass index and setting cutoff values for fasting glucose levels and A1Cs may be enough to determine whether an individual has pre-diabetes without having to administer an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT), say researchers in Maryland—including one at the National Institute for Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
0 comments - Posted Jan 1, 2003
C-reactive protein (CRP) is an inflammation marker that has been implicated in the development of type 2 diabetes in Caucasians (see "A New Buzzword," November 2002, p. 66). However, a new study has found that, among Mexicans, CRP is likely to predict type 2 diabetes in women but not in men.
0 comments - Posted Jan 1, 2003
December 2002
The circumference of your waist better forecasts the likelihood of cardiovascular disease (CVD) factors than your body mass index (BMI) does, according to Columbia University researchers.
1 comment - Posted Dec 1, 2002
Your doctor diagnoses you with type 2 diabetes and advises you to lose weight—and then gives you a prescription for a medication that is known to cause excessive weight gain.
0 comments - Posted Dec 1, 2002
November 2002
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is warning consumers not to take the Chinese weight loss products Chaso (Jianfei) Diet Capsules and Chaso Genpi. The FDA reports that several people in Japan have become ill, and some have died, after taking the diet products.
0 comments - Posted Nov 1, 2002
A shift in fat distribution from visceral (the internal abdominal area) to subcutaneous (under the skin) could be the reason the insulin sensitizer Actos (pioglitazone) helps to lower blood-glucose levels in people with insulin resistance.
0 comments - Posted Nov 1, 2002
Obesity and weight gain before diagnosis of diabetes are associated with future risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) among women with type 2 diabetes, say Harvard researchers.
0 comments - Posted Nov 1, 2002
Most people associate sweetness with happiness, good times and good food. In fact, the average American goes so far as to consume an estimated 20 teaspoons of sugar each day.
1 comment - Posted Nov 1, 2002
The holiday season presents many challenges for people with diabetes. Because we tend to eat more (at office parties and family outings) and exercise less during these months, weight gain could typically be as much as five to 10 pounds.
0 comments - Posted Nov 1, 2002
A shift in fat distribution from visceral (the internal abdominal area) to subcutaneous (under the skin) could be the reason the insulin sensitizer Actos (pioglitazone) helps to lower blood glucose levels in people with insulin resistance.
0 comments - Posted Nov 1, 2002
Obesity and weight gain before diagnosis of diabetes are associated with future risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) among women with type 2 diabetes, say Harvard researchers.
0 comments - Posted Nov 1, 2002
June 2002
"Clearly no diet works reliably," says Jan Harper of San Jose, California. Harper, who has type 2 diabetes, takes oral medications to control her diabetes and tries to adhere to a "good diet"-the advice most often given to people who have type 2. However, as Harper laments, what is a "good diet" or the "right diet" for a person with type 2 diabetes? Does such a thing actually exist?
0 comments - Posted Jun 1, 2002
May 2002
Many people who want to lose weight are not following the recommended guidelines for weight loss, according to researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Two-thirds of those trying to lose weight and four-fifths of those trying not to gain weight are not following the recommended guidelines of cutting calories and/or fat and exercising at least two and a half hours a week, write the researchers in the February 2002 issue of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
0 comments - Posted May 1, 2002
April 2002
A type of weight-loss surgery called the LAP-BAND has been successful in putting type 2 diabetes in remission, according to researchers in Australia. Doctors from Monash University in Victoria found that the majority of people with type 2 diabetes who were treated with the stomach-reduction surgery achieved better blood-glucose control one year afterward. Results of the study were published in the February 2002 issue of Diabetes Care.
1 comment - Posted Apr 1, 2002
For the first time in years, I bought something from the Misses Department, not the plus sizes!" exclaims Sue Felton, a woman of 43 who's been battling obesity and type 2 diabetes for the past five years.
0 comments - Posted Apr 1, 2002
March 2002
A low-calorie diet, particularly one that includes meal-replacement foods, can lead to long-term weight loss, according to researchers at the University of Kentucky. In addition, they say, more exercise helps to keep the weight off. Researchers examined data from 29 studies of weight-loss programs for their report, which was published in the November 2001 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
0 comments - Posted Mar 1, 2002
January 2002
High-protein diets that cut back on fruits, vegetables and carbohydrates put you at risk for multiple diseases and won't help you lose weight, according to the American Heart Association (AHA).
1 comment - Posted Jan 1, 2002
December 2001
A study in the September issue of Obesity Research suggests that the anti-depressant drug bupropion (Wellbutrin) is effective at producing weight loss.
0 comments - Posted Dec 1, 2001
November 2001
A new surgical procedure for weight loss could be more harmful than expected, say researchers. The gastric band, which received FDA approval for testing, had to be removed from a significant number of patients and did not achieve satisfactory weight loss in most of them, according to the report published in the June issue of the Annals of Surgery.
0 comments - Posted Nov 1, 2001
October 2001
Eat a low-fat diet, take a brisk walk or ride a bike for 30 minutes a day five days a week and your risk of getting type 2 diabetes will be reduced by 58 percent. Also, taking the type 2 drug Glucophage can also cut the risk of developing type 2 by 31 percent, say researchers in the United States.
0 comments - Posted Oct 1, 2001
A group of Brazilian researchers say bariatric surgery (stomach stapling) is the most effective therapy for extreme obesity. Their recent studies show that glucose control can also improve with the surgery.
0 comments - Posted Oct 1, 2001
August 2001
On June 5, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a surgically implanted adjustable stomach band, called the Lap-Band Adjustable Gastric Banding System, for treating severe obesity.
0 comments - Posted Aug 1, 2001
July 2001
May 22, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it will review the weight-loss drug orlistat (Xenical) to determine if it is a suitable treatment for type 2 diabetes. If given FDA approval, Xenical, which works by preventing about one-third of the fat in the food consumed from being absorbed, will be the first weight-loss drug indicated for the treatment of type 2 diabetes.
0 comments - Posted Jul 1, 2001
May 2001
According to the American Society of Bariatric Physicians (ASBP), BMI—a measurement of height and weight—is the gold standard for measuring obesity.
0 comments - Posted May 1, 2001
Results of a recent study suggest that liposuction—commonly perceived as a strictly cosmetic procedure—may have significant health benefits for people with diabetes.
0 comments - Posted May 1, 2001
January 2001
Weight loss is one of the cornerstones of treating and preventing type 2 diabetes. A new study, however, suggests patients continue to set weight-loss goals that are unattainable, even when counseled. This, in turn, translates to perceptions of failure.
0 comments - Posted Jan 1, 2001
September 2000
A new study published in the July 18 Annals of Internal Medicine says exercising without dieting is as effective for modest weight loss as dieting without exercising.
0 comments - Posted Sep 1, 2000
June 2000
Traditionally referred to as "adult-onset" diabetes, type 2 diabetes was previously rare in children. With the American population gaining more weight and following a higher-fat and carbohydrate diet, however, health professionals are seeing more kids develop type 2 diabetes.
0 comments - Posted Jun 1, 2000
January 2000
A recent study published in the May issue of Epidemiology has led its authors to conclude that even losing as little as two pounds per year can significantly reduce an individual's chance of developing type 2 diabetes. Although obesity is widely recognized as a risk factor for developing type 2 diabetes, so far there has been little evidence to prove that the converse is true.
0 comments - Posted Jan 7, 2000
August 1999
Jerry Mathers, one of the most beloved childhood actors of all time, starred as Beaver Cleaver in the hit television show "Leave it to Beaver" from 1957 to 1963. When the show concluded in 1963, Mathers attended University of California, Berkeley, and then worked in real estate and catering. In the 1980's, Mathers got back together with several "Leave it To Beaver" original cast members, and starred in "The New Leave it To Beaver," which ran from 1982 to 1989. As Mathers puts it, he sort of "retired" after the series concluded, and from that point on, his life became sedentary. An ensuing weight gain of about five to seven pounds per year followed.
2 comments - Posted Aug 1, 1999
July 1999
Orlistat, brand name Xenical, a new drug for weight loss, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The first of a new class of drugs called lipase inhibitors, Xenical does have some side effects that may be difficult to discuss in polite company.
0 comments - Posted Jul 1, 1999
April 1999
I never thought I would weigh over 200 pounds in my life, yet I stepped on the scales one day and weighed 214 pounds!
0 comments - Posted Apr 1, 1999
May 1998
How full did that meal you just ate make you feel? Did it satisfy your hunger, or did it make you feel like you'll need a snack later?
0 comments - Posted May 1, 1998
November 1997
It seems like half of America is either on a diet or thinking about going on one. Every month a new exercise fad is promoted as the miracle solution to weight loss. Entire sections of grocery stores are devoted to fat-free foods and low-calorie snack items. Book shops feature the latest in celebrity exercise books and tapes. Yet, statistics tell us that Americans are still gaining weight.
0 comments - Posted Nov 1, 1997
August 1997
Many young women with diabetes are putting looks before their health, even going so far as to stop taking insulin to lose weight.
0 comments - Posted Aug 1, 1997
May 1996
Even though doctors say slight weight loss can greatly benefit a person's health, overweight adults feel they must lose a significant amount of weight to reduce health problems, according to a recent poll.
0 comments - Posted May 1, 1996
January 1996
Fluoxetine is the generic name for Prozac, the increasingly-popular antidepressant drug. A study published in Diabetic Medicine, May 1995, reported that fluoxetine may help elderly people with type 2 diabetes lose weight.
0 comments - Posted Jan 1, 1996
A report published in the September 1995 issue of Annals of Surgery indicates that gastric bypass surgery can be an effective treatment for diabetes.
0 comments - Posted Jan 1, 1996
November 1995
You watch your diet, take up jogging, and don't even look at pictures of high-fat goodies. After a month, you hop on the scale and find you've lost a whopping three pounds.
0 comments - Posted Nov 1, 1995
A study led by Per G. Clauson, MD, in Stockholm, Sweden recently determined that the absorption of rapid-action insulin is slow in both obese and non-obese patients with type 2 diabetes when compared with type I patients.
0 comments - Posted Nov 1, 1995
July 1995
It was a year ago that Evelyn Narad found herself practically immobilized by a broken shoulder. A 74-year-old woman with type 2 diabetes, she was very overweight, dependent on daily insulin, and miserable.
0 comments - Posted Jul 1, 1995
October 1994
Q: Why is weight loss so emphasized for people with type 2 diabetes? A: Excess body fat increases insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes is primarily a condition of resistance to insulin. Approximately 80% of the people with type 2 diabetes are overweight at diagnosis. Consequently, weight loss tends to reverse this disorder in most people and some are able to eliminate medication and rely solely on exercise, diet, and blood glucose monitoring.
0 comments - Posted Oct 1, 1994
August 1993
In a 28-week behavioral weight control program, 22 obese patients with non-insulin dependent diabetes (NIDDM) were recruited to determine the effects of self blood glucose monitoring (SBGM) in diabetes management. For the first eight weeks, all the participants met in weekly support groups. After eight weeks, the original group was divided in two, with the first half continuing the support groups, and the second adding SBGM and dietary carbohydrate counting. While the results in weight loss were identical for both groups, the study revealed that people in the support group experienced a substantial decline in HbA1c levels, followed by a rapid "rebound," while in the second group, HbA1c levels consistently declined. The results of the study suggest that SBGM and carbohydrate counting should be recognized as important tools in the management of non-insulin dependent as well as insulin-dependent diabetes.
0 comments - Posted Aug 1, 1993