Sunday, October 29, 2006

mystery of sugar...

I had a salad, with low cal dressing and water. Two hours later, my blood sugar reading was quite high (171 I think but I'll have to look it up). The dismaying thing about this is I've eatten stuff that should have "flashed" to blood sugar easier than a salad and (perhaps) too many slices of salami.

I am going to correlate meal type and blood sugar one of these days.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

My "Nurse Case Manager" or "Diabetic Coach" Karen and I...

This is my "Nurse Case Manager" or "Diabetic Coach" Karen and I at the Diabetics Seminar, at the Dodge City Senior Center, on 24 October 2006. (Yes, my name is "Mike", I live in Dodge City Kansas and too many people can identify me. Still, I feel the desire to be secretive about my "real" name.)


Me and my "Diabretic Coach" Karen ("Diabetic Educator" actually). I don't have permission to give her full name and any locating information so I won't...
"My" Karen and another nurse.



Tuesday, October 10, 2006

dying by abundance

______In this Slate article, ("Please Do Not Feed the Humans" or "The global explosion of fat") William Saletan discusses how our species evolved in an environment of food scarcity. The recent (last century) abundance of food has happened too fast for evolution to counter said abundance with improved inherited "time to stop eating" mechanisms and anti-obesity, anti-diabetes, anti-heart attack mechanisms, etc. We're being killed by the survival mechanisms that allowed our ancestors to survive long enough to beget us!
______I remember worrying about losing 10 pounds in high school. I also remember girls being mocked for being 5 to 10 pounds overweight. Now, I'm probably 50 pounds overweight and can't seem to lose that weight. Sadly, I work with young men who are overweight to the point of looking pregnant.
______Decades ago, I noted that poor blacks in southern Mississippi seemed to be the most obese. I later realized they were eating cheap and very high calory foods. A fairly snotty and apparently anti-American Brit ("The end of obesity?" by Gwynne Dyer) commented on this as well. This Brit expected the obesity epidemic to fizzle out due to "global warming" and a return to food scarcity by the end this century. (I take a certain amount of comfort in the realization that diabetes and probable heart problems and simply age will render me dead well before then. I was born in 1951...)
______In spite of my gloomy belief the human race will kill itself off in the next century or two (probably via that old standby, killing over religious differences). Perhaps not the death of the entire species, maybe a small enough fraction of the current overpopulation will survive and humans will once again be were they were for so many millienum: on the endangered species list! (I smirk whilst reading this but I really hope it doesn't happen. I want the various kids in my family and the families of friends to survive. I'd be lying if I said I worried about foreigners...)
______So what is the point of this blog? Well, given that type 2 diabetes is caused by obesity and there has been an explosive increase in both childhood obesity and childhood type 2 diabetes, then we need to be worried. Twenty years ago, "childhood type 2 diabetes" simply didn't exist (supposedly).