Diabetes month is an excuse for the merchants who profit from diabetes to tout their wares. Though the drug store flyers may announce that it is "Diabetes month", I note that the prices of the diabetes test strips they are highlighting haven't gone down a penny-and are twice what they were in 1998 when I started buying them. This price increase is far greater than inflation. Are you earning twice what you earned in 1998?
Diabetes month is an opportunity for nutritionists to be quoted in the media telling us how if we cut all the fat out of our diets and ate healthy grains we wouldn't have diabetes.
Diabetes month is when you will read how children cause their Type 2 diabetes by being lazy, though it is far more likely that the huge increase in the Type 2 diabetes in levels in children too young to have caused it via eating patterns has almost certainly been caused by prenatal exposure to environmental toxins like Bisphenol-A which occurs in detectable levels in many canned foods and juices and, more importantly, in baby bottles sold as "Bisphenol-A free." Other common promoters of diabetes in children and adults are commonly used herbicides and arsenic which have contaminated our water supply and the SSRIs, routinely fed pregnant women, which research has proven raise insulin resistance and cause obesity.
World Diabetes Day is even more useless. A bunch of folks in the online diabetes community have been wasting their energy campaigning for a "blue doodle" on Google for World Diabetes Day. My response to this is, "Why?" The doodle doesn't convey a single bit of useful information to a single person. Which is the reason that World Diabetes Day bothers me.
Because the only reason to "raise awareness" of diabetes, is if the awareness we were raising included the simple, easily conveyed information that could HELP people control their diabetes. Which is does not.
What is that information? Just this:
Eating Any Kind of Carbohydrate Raises Blood Sugar. Cutting Out Carbs Lowers Blood Sugar Safely and Effectively.
This stupidly simple statement would be enough to help the tens of millions of people with Type 2 diabetes world wide improve their blood sugar. It would be news to a lot of people with Type 1 too.
In fact, it would surprise a lot of doctors who still do not know it is for people with Type 2 to achieve normal blood sugars merely by cutting way back on carbs.
Unfortunately, you will look in vain for any hint of this in any of the activities associated with any of these Diabetes Days, Weeks or Months.
Until they do, these diabetes events will remain what they really are: fund raising opportunities for organizations that have never told people with diabetes the truth about their condition.
If you feel strongly about the importance of these token diabetes events, I would urge you do the following.
Instead of lighting real or virtual candles, how about burning boxes of breakfast cereal labeled "Diabetes Friendly."
Instead of a blue doodle, how about campainging to see the American Diabetes Association explain on its "tight control" web page that lowering carbohydrates will lower blood sugar safely and effectively. The word "Carbohydrate" still does not appear on the ADA's "tight control" page.
Instead of encouraging people to contribute to the large, bloated charities whose track record for doing anything for people with diabetes is abysmal, why not print and distribute as many copies of the "How to Get Your Blood Sugar Under Control flyer" as possible. I have heard from hundreds of people with all kinds of diabetes who tell me that following the instructions on that flyer has dropped their blood sugars from levels producing A1cs as high as 13% to the normal 5% range.
You will find the link to download the flyer in a format using the blood sugar units your country uses at the bottom of THIS PAGE.
I don't want to raise awareness of diabetes. I want to raise awareness of how to CONTROL diabetes.
Until then, all raising awareness about diabetes does is reinforce the tragically flawed beliefs the population has that diabetes is caused by gluttony and sloth and is the punishment people get for overeating.
This is of course not true. If you want ammunition for countering this misinformation you will find it here:
You Did Not Eat Your Way to Diabetes
Diabetes is caused by the fatal combination of specific genes and environmental factors which attack people with those genes. These factors attack people with diabetes genes starting out in the womb and continuing on through life. Dramatic increases in the incidence of diabetes have been associated with a host of chemicals that pollute our environment, including common herbicides and plastics, and widely prescribed psychiatric drugs, many of which are now in trace amounts in our drinking water.
And as we all know by now the high fructose corn syrup, which also invaded our food supply a generation ago, greatly increases insulin resistance because it converts to intracellular liver fat.
The huge increase in the incidence of Type 1 diabetes probably is linked to the invasion of our food supply a generation ago by soy protein, because soy contains substances that damage the lining of the gut and allow food proteins, most notably gluten, to enter the blood stream and provoke antibodies including those that attack the pancreas.
By all means, lets spread "awareness" but let that awareness be of the FACTS. Not the garbled, industry friendly message that the corporate sponsors of these diabetes organizations would prefer the public to hear.
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