Archive for the ‘Diabetes’ Category

Diabetes Rates Keep Escalating

November 12th, 2009

Diabetes, Incidence Increasing, Obesity, Sugar

Incredible though it seems, over 11 percent of Americans now have diabetes, and the rate keeps climbing. In another few years, at the current pace of increase, a full 15 percent of the population will have the disease according to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. And those figures only count the people who already have been diagnosed with diabetes. An NIH study earlier this year found that 13 percent of the population already has the disease, though many of those haven’t yet been diagnosed. Plus, if you count pre-diabetics, the numbers skyrocket. A few years ago, when "only" seven percent of the population had been diagnosed with diabetes, another 20 percent qualified as pre-diabetic, and among the 40 to 74-year-old set, the pre-diabetic rate registered at an astronomical 40 percent. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. According to the US Government, one third of all children currently in the population pipeline will eventually become diabetic — half if they are black or Hispanic.

Translated into numbers, at least 26 million Americans now are diabetic and 37 million will be by 2015. This represents a more than 90 percent increase in the past decade. And the increase extends to other countries, as well. In Mexico, diabetes has become the number one cause of death, and yet, the disease hardly existed in that country just 10 years ago. Worldwide, 30 million people had diabetes in 1985, but by 2000, that number had increased almost 700 percent to 150 million. (As a side note, no health care system in the world can accommodate those kinds of numbers when it comes to long-term medical care. The costs are beyond astronomical.)

The blame, experts say, rests in the ballooning numbers of obese individuals. While it is true that diabetes runs in families, it’s also true that the fatter you are, the greater the chance that you’ll become diabetic. According to Gallup Healthways, "More than one-fifth of obese adults [have diabetes]" — or 21.2%, compared to 7.4% of non-obese people of comparable ages." It’s no coincidence that obesity rates have increased one percent since last year, keeping perfect pace with diabetes, which also increased one percent.

The disease demolishes health, causing neuropathy, kidney damage, heart disease, stroke, and wounds that don’t heal. Diabetes related infections lead to 150,000 amputations annually in the US.) Plus, it causes retinopathy, which can lead to blindness, and in fact, diabetes is the leading cause of blindness in the US.

Diabetes also is a problem for the pocketbook (unless you happen to be a stakeholder in a pharmaceutical company that manufactures diabetes drugs). Articles in the Archives of Internal Medicine indicate that spending on diabetes drugs has doubled since 2002, with annual expenditures exceeding $12.5 billion!

But the expensive drugs do nothing to heal or prevent diabetes; they merely control or treat symptoms. If obesity triggers the disease, then to intervene in the diabetes epidemic, lots of people need to lose weight. Exercising even a minimal amount not only takes pounds off, but slashes diabetes risk. The study found that those who had exercised for 30 minutes at least four times the previous week had almost half the incidence of diabetes compared to those who hadn’t done any exercise.

While the diabetes drug industry keeps blossoming, fewer and fewer people are making the lifestyle modifications that might prevent diabetes in the first place. Gallup-Healthways found "a 2009 decline of 2.7 points in the percentage of American adults who say they are exercising at least 30 minutes three or more times per week, compared with 2008."

And yet, a study just published in The Lancet found that lifestyle changes trump drugs in preventing diabetes. In fact, the study, which involved 3000 pre-diabetic patients followed for 10 years, found that lifestyle modifications resulting in a weight loss of even a few pounds were roughly twice as effective as medications. The researchers found that those who exercised 30 minutes five times a week plus stuck to a low-fat diet reduced diabetes incidence by 34 percent over the 10 years compared to a control group that implemented no changes. Those who took the diabetes drug metformin instead of trying lifestyle modifications reduced incidence by only 18 percent. The impact of lifestyle modifications was particularly notable in those over 60 years of age.

The advantage of modifying diet and exercising rather than popping pills extends beyond the fact that the lifestyle changes work better. Getting in shape means keeping the body working well, whereas diabetes drugs don’t improve the natural functioning of the body. Plus, they cause all sorts of side effects. Metformin is considered one of the more benign diabetes pharmaceuticals, and yet, it commonly causes digestive problems and gastrointestinal distress, and can cause more serious conditions such as lactic acidosis and heart failure.

As I’ve written before, forcing blood sugar levels down with medications does nothing to relieve the underlying diabetic condition. It merely suppresses just one of its manifestations. If you want to prevent and reverse diabetes, you have to reduce sugar intake, reduce insulin resistance, improve beta cell function in the pancreas, and protect and repair insulin/sugar damage to mission critical organs in the body. And you have to do all of these things all at once.

It’s the same old story all over again. There’s no substitute for avoiding obesity in the first place by eating well and exercising. But if you’ve already crossed the line to become diabetic or at high risk for diabetes, you’ll still benefit from utilizing natural methods for regulating blood sugar metabolism.

:hc

Way Over Sugar Threshold: Health Blog

September 17th, 2009

Diabetes, Sugar

Let’s say you’re a woman, aged 54, who just played tennis as you do every Monday and Wednesday, and on your way home you stop for a small soda. By the time you finish that drink, you’ll have consumed about 50 percent more added sugar than you should for the entire day, according to the American Heart Association (AHA). That means that anything else you eat with added sugar — cereals, crackers, snacks, treats, ketchup, frozen meals, barbecue sauce, salad dressing, and so on — puts you even more over the top. Everyone pretty much knows they eat too much sugar during the day. The surprise is how much too much and in how many foods it’s hidden.

According to a new report by the AHA, Americans eat way too much sugar — an average of 22 teaspoons a person daily. That’s almost half a cup every single day. If someone handed you a half cup filled with cane sugar, it’s unlikely that you’d even think of downing the entire amount, and yet, if you’re a typical American, you probably eat double that on your more indulgent days. In fact, teens eat 34 teaspoons daily, on average, or almost three-quarters of a cup. And note that these figures do not include sugars from natural sources, such as fruits and fruit juices. This only counts sugars added to food.

How much sugar should you have at the upper limit? The AHA has established specific guidelines for adults based on how much you can burn off calorie-wise, totally ignoring sugar’s other detrimental qualities. The amounts vary wildly, depending on your age, sex, and activity level. For instance:

  • Active men aged 21-25 can have up to 18 teaspoons, maximum
  • Sedentary men aged 46-50: up to nine teaspoons
  • Moderately active women aged 51-55: up to five teaspoons
  • Sedentary women aged 71-75: up to three teaspoons

Plus, the report says, the average woman shouldn’t consume more than 100 calories per day from added sugars, and the average man should limit added sugars to 150 calories per day. For some perspective, that’s less than you’ll get in a bowl of oatmeal with cinnamon and spice. “Excessive consumption of sugars has been linked to several metabolic abnormalities and adverse health conditions, as well as shortfalls of essential nutrients,” says the AHA statement.

Unfortunately for those who rely on the AHA guidelines, the problem with all that extra sweetness goes far beyond weight gain, and even tooth decay. “Excessive consumption of sugars has been linked to several metabolic abnormalities and adverse health conditions, as well as shortfalls of essential nutrients,” says the AHA statement. Studies show that high-sugar diets boost triglycerides and increase risk of stroke, hypertension, and heart disease. And of course, eating a sugar overload depletes the pancreas, builds up cellular resistance to insulin, and increases diabetes risk.

Where do all the extra sugars come from? Certainly sodas and candy drive up the numbers, with a 12-ounce soda adding eight to 12 teaspoons. A bag of Skittles adds another 12 teaspoons, and a cup of ice-cream piles on 10 more. But it’s obvious that desserts and soft drinks would up the sugar quota. What if you never have dessert, if you eat “healthy” packaged foods? Well, if you have a small fruit-flavored yogurt for breakfast, you’ll pick up six teaspoons. Raisin Bran adds another six. Fruitopia in a 20-oz serving gives you 18 more. Add on another 3.5 from baked beans, another four from your low-fat salad dressing, and another six for a snack of 1/3 cup of dried cranberries.
In other words, it’s easy to accumulate added sugar without even opting for “sweet” foods. Sugar keeps sneaking into prepared foods, disguised by names such as maltose, dextrose, high-fructose corn syrup, and so on. But for the average American, it’s soda that’s really the culprit, according to lead author Rachel Johnson of the University of Vermont. It’s the number one source of added sugars in the diet, fueling the $115 billion revenues that sodas rake in each year. In the three decades from 1970 to 2000, soft-drink consumption increased by 70 percent in the US. Given that a regular can of soda averages 135 calories from sugar, and that amount exceeds the allowable amount for women according to the AHA, it’s no wonder we’re getting increasingly fat.

Predictably, the sugar and soft-drink industries found creative ways to double-talk around the AHA report. The American Beverage Association, for instance, issued a statement claiming that, “Like many foods, soft drinks and other sugar-sweetened beverages are a source of calories, but in and of themselves, they are not a unique risk factor for obesity or other negative health outcomes — including heart disease.” Being generous, I guess we could call that a point of view.

The Sugar Association then ramped up the nonsense, accusing the American Heart Association of “[issuing] a scientific statement titled ‘Dietary Sugars Intake and Cardiovascular Health’ without a higher standard of evidence to support its contentions and therefore misleading the average consumer.” They go on to say that “every major systematic review of the body of scientific evidence exonerates sugar as the cause of any lifestyle disease, including heart disease and obesity.” (Perhaps it’s just me, but I have to think that claiming that “every major systematic review” exonerates sugar would qualify as a tad hyperbolic.) Finally, they resort to finger-pointing, noting that the European Food Safety Authority and an expert panel convened by the Institute of Medicine in 2002 did not set an upper limit for added sugars.

Seems rather a desperate response, perhaps compounded by the fact that a sugar shortage looms on the horizon. According to a report just issued by the USDA, because so much corn formerly used for corn sweetener has been getting repurposed for ethanol, and because of strict import limits on sugar, “the United States will end the next fiscal year with less than 13 days’ worth of sugar on hand, unless imports are increased…our nation will virtually run out of sugar.” What sweet irony that these two reports — the one from the AHA and one from the USDA–came out at about the same time, and that the sugar shortage, should it occur, will naturally take care of the sugar overload problem the AHA cites.

Thank goodness we have artificial sweeteners to fall back on.

:hc

Black Tea Inhibits Diabetes: Health Blog

August 10th, 2009

Black Tea, Diabetes

Everybody knows green tea is healthier than black tea. Right? Well, not so fast! Though green tea has received much acclaim because of its superstar antioxidant content, black tea, it turns out, does more to lower blood sugar. Black tea contains a polysaccharide that works very much the way pharmaceutical diabetes drugs work, according to a new study out of Tianjin University in China.

It’s been known for some time that tea offers benefits to diabetics, but previous research hasn’t compared the various kinds of tea to see which works best. This study compared the effects of green tea, black tea, and oolong. Although all three types of tea come from the same type of plant — camellia sinensis — they get processed differently, and it is the processing that creates differences in flavor and composition. Black tea undergoes the most processing and is fully fermented; green tea, which is unfermented, undergoes the least, and oolong tea fits right into the middle.

The natural assumption is that less processing is better, and in fact, green tea does preserve its antioxidant content better, plus has less caffeine. It’s the catechins in green tea that confer all those health benefits, and in processing, those catechins convert into other compounds. Still, according to Dr. John Weisburger of the Institute for Cancer Prevention, “Whether it’s green or black, tea has about eight to 10 times the [antioxidants] found in fruits and vegetables.”

Plus, a closer look at what happens to the catechins in the process of making black tea reveals that they simply convert into other antioxidants — theaflavins and thearubigens, which, although probably not as powerful as catechins, do confer health benefits that just now are starting to be investigated. Studies have shown that in addition to lowering blood sugar, black tea has antiviral properties, anticancer properties, and it improves cardiovascular function to a remarkable degree.

But the research on the blood-sugar lowering properties of tea focused not on the catechin content, but on the polysaccharide content in the tea. It seems that processing tea reduces the molecular weight of the polysaccharides, and according to head researcher Haixia Chen, those lighter-weight polysaccharides actually work better to block an enzyme called alpha-glucosidase, which converts starch into glucose. This is exactly what the mainstay diabetes drugs Precose and Glyset do. Plus, black-tea polysaccharides showed the best ability to scavenge disease-causing free radicals. In other words, the polysaccharides in black tea have far more powerful antioxidant properties than the polysaccharides in other teas. The game is still on.

Black tea already has been used in diabetes treatment in China and Japan because of its ability to reduce blood sugar, but this research takes it one step further by demonstrating that black tea actually stops the blood sugar spike triggered by eating. Dr. Chen says, “Many efforts have been made to search for effective glucose inhibitors from natural materials. There is a potential for exploitation of black tea polysaccharide in managing diabetes.”

The researchers say they don’t know if simply drinking black tea will do the trick. They used black tea extract derived by chemically processing the tea leaves. Certainly, drinking organic tea minus the chemicals has far more appeal from the standpoint of both pleasure and cost, to say nothing about consuming chemical residue, but there’s a potential goldmine in selling tea extract that might influence what consumers get told. Given that in the US alone, eight percent of the population already has diabetes and that percentage keeps increasing, the pharmaceutical companies may be poised to elbow out the tea companies and exploit a fortune in prescription Earl Gray. Already, US consumers pay $116 billion annually for diabetes medication, much of which could be converted to tea medication. (If you want to partake in the profits and you live in warm, wet climes, this might be a good time to plant some camellia sinensis — seriously.)

It also might be a good time to start drinking it, because in spite of what the researchers say, previous studies have shown that merely drinking tea does work. A study a few months ago, for instance, found that drinking three cups of black tea daily cut stroke risk by 21 percent. Another study last year found that both green tea and black tea reduced blood sugar as well as the incidence of diabetic cataracts in rats. The researchers concluded that average-weight adults could get the same effect by drinking 4.5 cups of tea daily.

One note before you start taking tea breaks every few hours: drink your tea without milk of any sort, including soy milk, as some studies indicate that milk blocks the action of the beneficial compounds in tea (1, 2, 3). Although the studies are conflicting, it’s probably best to err on the side of caution. And by the way, if you don’t enjoy tea, studies show that drinking six cups of coffee daily cuts diabetes risk by 50 percent for men and 30 percent for women. Of course, imbibing six or more cups of coffee daily simultaneously ups the risk of bouncing off the walls, annoying your spouse, and setting off hypertension, kidney stones, osteoporosis, and so on. You’ll probably stay safer and more civilized drinking 4.5 cups of tea.

Or, you can just look for a black tea extract in your neighborhood health food store.

:hc

Intense Exercise Slashes Diabetes Risk: Health Blog

January 31st, 2009

Prevent Diabetes

Here’s some miracle news for those who want to stay in shape and ward off disease, but also want to spend most of their time slouching and lounging around.  A new study has found that very short but intense bursts of exercise prevent diabetes and cardiac problems more effectively than long, sweat-provoking workouts. In fact, the mini-exercise sessions that work so well are short enough that you could almost complete them during a commercial break.

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Arsenic, Diabetes, and Drinking Water: Health Blog

September 11th, 2008

Arsenic Drinking Water

A new study out of Johns Hopkins has found that, even at low levels, exposure to the heavy metal arsenic may lead to a fourfold increase in the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. This could be a problem for you if you’re drinking water directly from the tap because the public water supply in most locals contains trace amounts of arsenic. The study, out of Johns Hopkins, measured the arsenic content in the urine of nearly 800 individuals and found a strong association between high arsenic content and the presence of the diabetes. In fact, arsenic in the urine is about equal to obesity as a diabetes risk factor.

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Stevia Approved, Sort of: Health Blog

August 1st, 2008

Diabetes Prevention

Move over aspartame and sucralose. A new, natural sweetener has finally come to market. The Coca-Cola Company and Cargill just announced the introduction of Truvia — a zero-calorie sweetener derived from natural sources. But wait — is the product really new? Not exactly. Truvia is a derivative of stevia — that previously maligned sweetener that the FDA disparaged as a mere dietary supplement (upgraded from its previous status as an unsafe food additive).

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Depression Causes Diabetes – Diabetes Causes Depression: Health Blog

June 30th, 2008

diabetes, depression, johns hopkins

A study out of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore has shown that depressed people have a stunning, 42- percent increased risk of developing diabetes when compared to people who aren’t depressed. The study followed 5,201 people, aged 45 to 84, for three years. The subjects did not have diabetes at the outset of the study. Even when the researchers controlled for pre-existing factors such as obesity, inactivity, and smoking, they found that risk for diabetes was still 34 percent higher in patients with depression. They also found that the deeper the depression, the greater the likelihood that the subject would become diabetic.

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Stomach Stapling to Cure Diabetes: Health Blog

February 11th, 2008

lap_band

Researchers in Australia are jumping up and down like kangaroos in excitement over new data that suggests that obesity surgery can eliminate diabetes far more effectively than other treatments. Dr. John Dixon of Monash University Medical School in Melbourne led a study that found that those Type 2 diabetes patients who had stomach-reducing operations were five times more likely to be diabetes free within two years than those who merely maintained a regimen of standard diabetes care.  Of the 55 patients in the study, 29 underwent obesity surgery, and of those, 22 tested negative for diabetes two years later. Of the 26 patients who didn’t have the surgery, only four achieved similar remission.

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Avandia, Guns for Hire: Health Blog

August 11th, 2007

payola

Who should you listen to?

A meta-analysis of previously published studies on the efficacy and safety of the diabetes drug Avandia (rosiglitazone )written by the whistle blower, Dr. Steve Nissen, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine has revealed a disturbing trend of increased heart attack risk. The study reported a 43% increase of heart failure, 15.2 times the risk compared to an older drug, Glucotrol along with a 9.5 times greater risk of liver damage.

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The Many Causes Of Impotence: Health Blog

December 13th, 2006

impotence.JPG

There are many causes of impotence, including: Vascular disease, Diabetes, Diseases of the nervous system, Cancer Surgery, Medications, Smoking, Alcoholism, and Hormone imbalance.

But of all these reasons, vascular disease and diabetes account for over half of all problems. Hardening of the arteries can affect the artery leading to the penis so that it cannot dilate enough to deliver all the blood necessary for an erection. Impotence can also occur if the nerves that control blood flow to the penis are damaged, which can happen with diabetes.

It’s important to understand that medications such as Viagra don’t actually get rid of the problem; they just find a way to bypass it. How is that done?

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