^ Jump up to: a b Picot J, Jones J, Colquitt JL, Gospodarevskaya E, Loveman E, Baxter L, Clegg AJ (September 2009). "The clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of bariatric (weight loss) surgery for obesity: a systematic review and economic evaluation". Health Technology Assessment. 13 (41): 1–190, 215–357, iii–iv. doi:10.3310/hta13410. PMID 19726018.
One of the most studied programs in the National Institutes of Health’s Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP). This program helps people who have pre-diabetes or a high risk of developing type 2 diabetes lose weight. Studies of the program have found that those who lost about seven percent of their initial weight, kept some of it off, and maintained an exercise program delayed the onset of type 2 diabetes for three years in 58% of cases.
There is no known preventive measure for type 1 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes – which accounts for 85–90% of all cases – can often be prevented or delayed by maintaining a normal body weight, engaging in physical activity, and consuming a healthy diet. Higher levels of physical activity (more than 90 minutes per day) reduce the risk of diabetes by 28%. Dietary changes known to be effective in helping to prevent diabetes include maintaining a diet rich in whole grains and fiber, and choosing good fats, such as the polyunsaturated fats found in nuts, vegetable oils, and fish. Limiting sugary beverages and eating less red meat and other sources of saturated fat can also help prevent diabetes. Tobacco smoking is also associated with an increased risk of diabetes and its complications, so smoking cessation can be an important preventive measure as well.
Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) resembles type 2 DM in several respects, involving a combination of relatively inadequate insulin secretion and responsiveness. It occurs in about 2–10% of all pregnancies and may improve or disappear after delivery. However, after pregnancy approximately 5–10% of women with GDM are found to have DM, most commonly type 2. GDM is fully treatable, but requires careful medical supervision throughout the pregnancy. Management may include dietary changes, blood glucose monitoring, and in some cases, insulin may be required.
People tend to push themselves until pain or fatigue makes them stop. They then rest for the shortest possible time, then get back to work until pain stops them again. You can prevent this cycle by pacing yourself: Figure out how much you can do without pain, and stop before you reach that point. Rest up, then start again. You’ll get more done with less pain.
Diabetes experts feel that these blood glucose monitoring devices give patients a significant amount of independence to manage their disease process; and they are a great tool for education as well. It is also important to remember that these devices can be used intermittently with fingerstick measurements. For example, a well-controlled patient with diabetes can rely on fingerstick glucose checks a few times a day and do well. If they become ill, if they decide to embark on a new exercise regimen, if they change their diet and so on, they can use the sensor to supplement their fingerstick regimen, providing more information on how they are responding to new lifestyle changes or stressors. This kind of system takes us one step closer to closing the loop, and to the development of an artificial pancreas that senses insulin requirements based on glucose levels and the body's needs and releases insulin accordingly - the ultimate goal.
Some risks of the keto diet include low blood sugar, negative medication interactions, and nutrient deficiencies. (People who should avoid the keto diet include those with kidney damage or disease, women who are pregnant or breast-feeding, and those with or at a heightened risk for heart disease due to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or family history. (40)
Ariana Shakibinia decided to study public health in large part because she lives with T1D. She had always been interested in public policy, but she says living with this disease has made her more vested in the healthcare conversation. “I am living with what is essentially a pre-existing condition. I’m fortunate enough to have good health insurance, but it makes the potential financial burden of T1D management much more visible and relatable.”
^ Cheng J, Zhang W, Zhang X, Han F, Li X, He X, Li Q, Chen J (May 2014). "Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors and angiotensin II receptor blockers on all-cause mortality, cardiovascular deaths, and cardiovascular events in patients with diabetes mellitus: a meta-analysis". JAMA Internal Medicine. 174 (5): 773–85. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.348. PMID 24687000.
Acupuncture is a procedure where a practitioner inserts very thin needles into specific points on your skin. Some scientists say that acupuncture triggers the release of the body's natural painkillers. Acupuncture has been shown to offer relief from chronic pain and is sometimes used by people with neuropathy, the painful nerve damage that can happen with diabetes.
Wellness was so unfamiliar at the time, Travis recalls, that he constantly had to spell the word when using it over the phone. It soon got national attention when a young doctoral student named Donald B. Ardell profiled Travis’s center in the April 1976 issue of Prevention magazine. In a sidebar, Prevention’s editor, Robert Rodale, welcomed the “exciting field of wellness enhancement,” promising that the magazine would “examine all aspects of wellness promotion.” Even greater exposure came with Rather’s “60 Minutes” piece, which focused on Travis and the Mill Valley center.
I am very excited by the closed-loop artificial pancreas trial which is now in its final stages. Professor Roman Hovorka at the University of Cambridge is currently perfecting an algorithm that enables a continuous glucose monitor and an insulin pump to talk to each other, and take over the delivery of insulin throughout the day and night, to keep glucose levels in range.
But carping over wellness faded away in the ’90s as the term gained a foothold in everyday use. The American Heritage Dictionary silently dropped the usage note on wellness in its fourth edition in 2000, a decision that its supervising editor, Steve Kleinedler, chalks up to the growing prevalence of wellness programs in the workplace and beyond. A word that once sounded strange and unnecessary, even to its original boosters, has become tacitly accepted as part of our lexicon of health. Well, well, well.
A 2017 article in the journal Diabetes Care explains that the goals for dietary change should be “healthful eating patterns emphasizing a variety of nutrient-dense foods in appropriate portion sizes.” Additional goals include achieving a healthy weight; attaining healthy blood sugar, blood pressure, and lipid levels; and reducing complications. The authors emphasize developing an individualized plan based on “personal and cultural preferences, health literacy and numeracy, access to healthful foods, willingness and ability to make behavioral changes, and barriers to change.”
Because both yeast and bacteria multiply more quickly when blood sugar levels are elevated, women with diabetes are overall at a higher risk of feminine health issues, such as bacterial infections, yeast infections, and vaginal thrush, especially when blood sugar isn't well controlled. And a lack of awareness about having prediabetes or diabetes can make managing blood sugar impossible.
The water was in boxes because Wellspring purposely forwent wasteful plastic bottles—a half measure, after inviting thousands of people to exercise in the desert. The water was alkaline because that’s a trendy new way to sell people water, and its maker was a sponsor of the festival. The class, too, was sponsored, an Adidas logo projected onto the wall. Outside was a food truck selling Bulletproof concoctions with “brain octane oil.” In a capacious central cavern was “one of the world’s largest wellness exhibitions,” where vendors pitched cosmetics and supplements and bars and tonics. On offer were complimentary CBD-oil massages (sponsored by the seller of said oils) and a balancing of people’s sacral chakras with something called a BioCharger (trademark), “a natural cellular revitalization platform that uses a full spectrum of light and harmonic frequencies to deliver restorative energy” and that promises to help with “creativity, sexuality, and acceptance of new experiences.”
Every year, 1.4 million Americans receive a life-altering diagnosis of diabetes. The most recent data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that nearly 10 percent of the population has diabetes, and diabetes remains the seventh leading cause of death in the United States. In fact, Type 2 diabetes is looming as the biggest epidemic and public health issue in human history.
The word podcast has by now become completely untethered from its namesake—the iPod. Analytics that were once uncapturable have become fairly comprehensive (downloads from Apple Podcasts surpassed 50 billion this year) and specific (Chicago streams more podcasts on Spotify than any other U.S. city does), which has brought new money and possibility to the form. Recipes for how to create a decent series were invented through trial and error, and thousands of producers now understand what makes our ears stand up: cults, cold cases, politics, feminism, and relationships, but most of all: stories.
For a wellness festival, there was an unexpected amount of talk about the importance of suffering and pain. In one panel about addiction, the ultramarathoner Charlie Engle, who ran 30 marathons in his first three years of sobriety, told the story of his first son being born. “He was gonna save me,” Engle recalled, “and then six days later, after a crack binge, the police are searching my car, and I had to choose between living and dying. And I chose running ... I wanted to pound that part of me out and never visit it again.”
Many herbal remedies have been used to reduce inflammation and pain. Writing in the online publication U.S. Pharmacist, Antoine Al-Achi, PhD, a Professor of Pharmaceutics at the Campbell University School of Pharmacy in North Carolina, reported that bromelain (pineapple enzyme), curcumin (an antioxidant found in turmeric), echinacea, chamomile, ginger, and arnica have shown anti-inflammatory effects. Preparations of these plant-based supplements are widely available at health-food stores. If you would like to try one or more of these supplements, speak to your doctor first about possible side effects and drug interactions.
This is the advice that diabetics received a hundred years ago. Even in Sweden, with the high fat-Petrén diet that included fatty pork cuts, butter and green cabbage. And when diabetics start eating this way today the same thing happens as it did in the past. Their blood sugar levels improve dramatically from day one. This makes sense, as they avoid eating what raises blood sugar.
Though the Oxford English Dictionary traces wellness (meaning the opposite of illness) to the 1650s, the story of the wellness movement really begins in the 1950s. New approaches to healthful living were emerging then, inspired in part by the preamble to the World Health Organization’s 1948 constitution: “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Halbert L. Dunn, chief of the National Office of Vital Statistics, was looking for new terminology to convey the positive aspects of health that people could achieve, beyond simply avoiding sickness. In a series of papers and lectures in the late ’50s, Dunn sketched out his concept of “high-level wellness,” defined as “an integrated method of functioning, which is oriented toward maximizing the potential of which the individual is capable.”
Medications used to treat diabetes do so by lowering blood sugar levels. There is broad consensus that when people with diabetes maintain tight glucose control (also called "tight glycemic control") -- keeping the glucose levels in their blood within normal ranges - that they experience fewer complications like kidney problems and eye problems. There is however debate as to whether this is cost effective for people later in life.
She says that the problem with diabetes is that it’s a silent disease. “Apart from needing to go to the loo a few times in the middle of the night, I experienced zero symptoms. Diabetes had no impact on my life – 99% of the time I forgot I even had it. Perhaps if it had been a disease with more symptoms, I would have been more motivated to do something about it.”
Founded in 2006, Massachusetts-based biotechnology startup Gelesis has raised a total of $118.2 million for developing an oral smart pill. In 2016, the company initially filed an IPO offering of $60 million, but pulled out and instead focused on raising more funding. The technology is based on capsules filled with tiny hydrogel particles that expand between 50 to 100 times their weight in size after absorbing water from the stomach, which results in increased satiety to help obese diabetes patients lose weight and control their sugar metabolism. They are currently undergoing a phase 2 clinical trial on their Gelesis200 product for treating diabetes.
"You only need 10 percent of your beta cells to supply sufficient insulin," Roep said. He said there have been a couple of rare cases where a patient had typical type 1 diabetes but could go through long periods without insulin injections. "Insulin needs can be a moving target, and if you have a lifestyle change it's very plausible that you have a lesser need for insulin, and you can deal with [diabetes] with the beta cells you have," Roep said.
I bring this up because sleep apnea increases a person’s risk for developing type 2 diabetes. Also, sleep-disordered breathing is also related to proper nutrition throughout life. And perhaps most importantly, the first line of defense in catching sleep-disordered breathing in patients early, are dentists. This is another area where dentists must get involved if we want to tackle the issue of pervasive type 2 diabetes with any success.
The reason they need it: Their own insulin-producing islet cells, located in the pancreas, aren’t working. Now, scientists across the US are racing to develop effective ways to transplant new islet cells in people with diabetes—an alternative that could make daily life easier and lower risk for insulin side effects like dangerous low blood sugar episodes.
The tuberculosis skin test is based on the fact that infection with M. tuberculosis produces a delayed-type hypersensitivity skin reaction to certain components of the bacterium. The standard recommended tuberculin test is administered by injecting 0.1mL of 5 TU (tuberculin units) PPD into the top layers of skin of the forearm. "Reading" the skin test means detecting a raised, thickened local area of skin reaction, referred to as induration. The area of induration (palpable, raised, hardened area) around the site of injection is the reaction to tuberculin.
Body blasting was just one of the hundreds of classes, sessions, panels, talks, and silent dance parties at the inaugural Wellspring wellness festival. Last month some 2,000 mannequin-shaped people floated into Palm Springs, California, for what advertisements promised to be “a first-of-its-kind wellness festival, that will feature over 200 transformational workshops, treatments, and fitness across multiple categories.” The goal was to “provide seekers the tools to learn and take action in real time for a healthier mind in a relational platform.” (Relational platform was a new term to me, but people seemed less than pleased when I used the word conference.)
This seems hard to do, but really it’s not if you know one secret: Replace snacking with something far more satisfying — fat. That’s right, the government is wrong to recommend a low fat diet. Fat is what makes you feel full until your next meal. Take away the fat, take away the full. Don’t go to an extreme, but do lean strongly toward a high-fat low-carb diet.
In type 2 diabetes (adult onset diabetes), the pancreas makes insulin, but it either doesn't produce enough, or the insulin does not work properly. Nine out of 10 people with diabetes have type 2. This type occurs most often in people who are over 40 years old but can occur even in childhood if there are risk factors present. Type 2 diabetes may sometimes be controlled with a combination of diet, weight management and exercise. However, treatment also may include oral glucose-lowering medications (taken by mouth) or insulin injections (shots).
Benari, an Ashkenazi Jew, doesn’t fall into that category. But Cummings and other bariatric experts I spoke to said that surgery should be a possible option for any person whose diabetes isn’t improving. Cummings himself is currently working on a clinical trial in India of bariatric patients with BMIs as low as 25. And he expects similar trials will come down the pipeline.
The body obtains glucose from three main sources: the intestinal absorption of food; the breakdown of glycogen (glycogenolysis), the storage form of glucose found in the liver; and gluconeogenesis, the generation of glucose from non-carbohydrate substrates in the body. Insulin plays a critical role in balancing glucose levels in the body. Insulin can inhibit the breakdown of glycogen or the process of gluconeogenesis, it can stimulate the transport of glucose into fat and muscle cells, and it can stimulate the storage of glucose in the form of glycogen.
^ Emadian A, Andrews RC, England CY, Wallace V, Thompson JL (November 2015). "The effect of macronutrients on glycaemic control: a systematic review of dietary randomised controlled trials in overweight and obese adults with type 2 diabetes in which there was no difference in weight loss between treatment groups". The British Journal of Nutrition. 114 (10): 1656–66. doi:10.1017/S0007114515003475. PMC 4657029. PMID 26411958.
Diabetes is a whole-body problem. The disease is marked by too high blood glucose, which affects the many cells fed by the circulatory system. The cells of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract and the nerves that control its movement are no exception. People with diabetes have an elevated risk for a spectrum of GI disorders that can make life uncomfortable. Identifying the cause of GI discomfort is the first step toward getting the right treatment and finding relief.