How to Prevent Diabetes Archives - Food Heaven Made Easy

Since diabetes management is such a loaded topic, we broke things up into 2 parts. This month, we’ll be go over risk factors for diabetes, signs/symptoms, getting a proper diagnosis, and the process of self-monitoring glucose (blood sugars) at home. Our special guest, Margarette Edouard, is a Certified Diabetes Educator (CDE) & Registered Dietitian (RD) and will be sharing all of her expertise with us. Next month, we’ll go into potential complications of diabetes, how to cope, medication use, & lifestyle changes to better manage the condition. Below is a brief overview of the topics discussed!

Diabetes Care & Management

In our previous episode, we spoke about things you can do to lower your risk for developing type 2 diabetes, and we got so much positive feedback from all of you.
We got tons of emails asking for a part 2, and so we’re back and this time around we have a special guest with us!
Margarette Edouard is a registered dietitian and certified diabetes educator. She has many years of experience helping people manage their diabetes, and she also happens to be my amazing co-worker
She’ll be joining us today and sharing all her valuable insight on diabetes care & management

What is diabetes?

Diabetes is a group of diseases that result in elevated blood glucose aka high blood sugars

Risk factors for DM:

Family history
Environmental factors
Overweight/obesity
Insulin resistance- which means that your cells are not responding to properly to insulin
Race & ethnicity (higher prevalence of type 2 in people of color)
Having a history of gestational diabetes
Having hypertension
Leading a sedentary lifestyle

Early detection & treatment of DM is extremely important. There are people that don’t want to know because they’re fearful. But knowing, and then making necessary lifestyle changes, will reduce your risk for developing diabetes-related complications.

Self-monitoring:

So let’s say you do have a confirmed diagnosis of diabetes. Your doctor may recommend that you start self-monitoring your sugars at home, especially if tests show that your sugars are uncontrolled. This involves getting a glucometer, which is a small machine that measures your blood sugars. You’ll prick yourself with a fine needle, and start recording your readings so you can review them with the doc.

Self-monitoring at home is so important because this way you have a better idea of how different foods and activities affect your blood sugars.
It’s important that you bring your logs and meters to doctors’ visits, because then you and the medical team and come up with a plan based on how your values are.
It could be that you’re eating healthfully, you’re active, and that as a result, and your values have dropped significantly.
In some cases, the doc may decrease the dose of your medication if you’re managing well with lifestyle changes.
Now, there are patients that do all of this and their sugars still remain high.
If that’s the case, the medication regimen may also have to get adjusted.

Diabetes is something that we are very passionate about- we know so many close ones affected by this disease, and work day in and day out with patients affected by diabetes. As people of color we are at increased risk. 1 in 3 people in the US have prediabetes and 9% of the US population has diabetes

Risk Factors For Diabetes

Excessive weight- having a BMI over 25
Being Black, Latino, Native American, and/or Asian
Lack of physical activity
Someone in the immediate family having diabetes (parents, siblings, grandparents)
Having other co-morbidities (high blood pressure, heart disease, etc)
Being over 45 years old
For women, having a history of gestational diabetes OR having had a baby over 9 pounds

If you have any of these risk factors, you should get tested for diabetes

Labs To Look Out For

There are 2 lab values you want to be aware of- one is fasting blood glucose and the other is hemoglobin A1c

Fasting Blood Glucose

Fasting blood glucose is your blood glucose taken at one point in time (usually in the morning when you haven’t had anything to eat)
In someone with no risk for diabetes – fasting blood glucose is under 100 mg/dL
In someone with diabetes, fasting is 125 mg/dL or higher

What about someone who is in between those numbers? 100-124 mg/dL is considered pre-diabetes, meaning that you have an increased risk for developing the condition
Studies show that 1 in 3 people with prediabetes will develop diabetes in the next 3 years

Hemoglobin A1c

The other lab that you need to know, which is arguably more important than your fasting glucose, is your hemoglobin A1c
A1c measures your average blood glucose over a 3 month period of time
You don’t have to fast, and results are not dependant on what you ate last night. It shows a bigger picture about your glucose control
Normal ranges are an A1c is less than 5.7%
In someone with prediabetes, the A1c is 5.7 to 6.4%
A1c’s of 6.5 or higher is consistent with diabetes
You can get tested for this every three months if your value was elevated- for example, if you go and your A1c is 5.9% and you want to make aggressive lifestyle changes, you can retest in 3 months to see if it has gone down

So What Should You Do?

The number two things are diet and lifestyle. There was this huge diabetes prevention study, that lasted for 5 years. They took people with diabetes, and divided them into 3 groups:

Group 1 had no intervention – over the 5 years they did no diet or lifestyle changes

Group 2 took metformin, which is a drug that is usually given to people who are newly diagnosed with diabetes

Group 3 ate healthier diets, worked out, and lost some weight

Which group had the best chance of preventing diabetes over the 5 year period?

Group 3. The study found that a loss of 10% of body weight decreased risk of developing diabetes by 85% over the next 3 years

What did these people do?

150 minutes of exercise per week, one-on-one counseling for the first 6 months, and group counseling thereafter. They also ate a well balance diet

Nutrition Recommendations:

There are 4 important things

FIBER. Getting enough fiber – study after study shows that fiber is so important in regulating blood sugar levels.Try to get 25-35 grams of fiber in your diet per day. High fiber foods include vegetables, beans, fruit, nuts, seeds, & whole grains
VEGETABLES. Try to eat at least 3 cups of non-starchy vegetables per day – think the rainbow – different vegetables have different nutrients and phytochemicals – if you can eat a veggie in each color of the rainbow every single day, you will be doing amazing
SUGAR. Cut out added sugars – added sugars are things like cakes, cookies, pies, candy, energy drinks- even juice. These foods are high in simple carbohydrates, which make your blood sugar skyrocket out of control – the goal is to maintain a stable blood sugar over time
CARBOHYDRATES. Speaking of carbs, watch them. We usually recommend that people with prediabetes or diabetes don’t go over a certain number of carb exchanges per meal.

This is really technical and if you guys want to learn more we can do a podcast going into more detail, BUT the jist of it is try to not make carbohydrates the base of your meals. Foods with carbs include fruit, grains (oatmeal, rice)- some surprising foods like yogurt, milk, pasta, etc.

These foods are typically healthy and you can eat them, but if you have elevated blood sugar, it’s a good idea to not overdo it on the portions

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