Diabetes For Dummies
Overview
The book that’s been helping people with diabetes live their best lives for 20 years
Diabetes For Dummies is a trusted resource that guides those diagnosed with diabetes and pre-diabetes and their caregivers towards optimal health. This book helps you, or those you love, achieve the life you want while managing diabetes with lifestyle changes, alternative therapies and the latest medications. This fully updated edition helps you tackle your symptoms with the confidence that you’re doing the latest stuff and following the newest advances in diabetes treatment. Powerful lifestyle strategies, new medications, monitoring equipment, nutritional guidelines, delicious recipes, and insulin delivery methods—it’s all in this friendly Dummies guide.
- Understand the types of diabetes and learn about your diagnosis
- Learn the latest treatment options, medications, and evidence-based therapies
- Manage your symptoms and live a full life with expert diet and lifestyle tips
- Answer your questions with this trusted, compassionate guide, now in its 6th edition
- Take control and understand how to improve or even prevent and reverse prediabetes and diabetes
This book is an indispensable resource for those newly diagnosed with diabetes, and prediabetes, their loved ones, and care givers, as well as health care professionals who need an up-to-date reference on the latest in diabetes research.
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About The Author
Dr. Simon Poole is a doctor, author, speaker, and consultant. Simon treats patients with type 1 and type 2 diabetes from the time of diagnosis onward and is an authority on the Mediterranean diet.
Amy Riolo is an award-winning author and chef. She’s also the author of Mediterranean Lifestyle For Dummies and Italian Recipes For Dummies.
Alan L. Rubin, MD is the original author of Diabetes For Dummies.
Sample Chapters
diabetes for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Diabetes, which is excessive glucose in your blood, leads to serious health problems if left untreated.You should follow the American Diabetes Association screening guidelines to get tested for diabetes at the earliest possible time.If you have diabetes, this Cheat Sheet is a handy reference to screening guidelines, rules for living with diabetes, and continuing your diabetes care to better control the disease.
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Diabetes doesn’t have to rule your life. Be proactive! Follow these guidelines for controlling your diabetes, and your problems should be few and far between:
Major monitoring: Make sure your doctor orders the key tests at the right times.
Devout dieting: Work with a dietitian to develop a great eating plan.
The following is a partial list of the many things you can do to prevent diabetes. Don’t try to do everything at once. Get used to one or two changes. Then add a couple more and so forth. The results will be both gratifying and very healthy.
Serve your meal on a small plate. You can actually trick yourself into thinking that it’s a lot more food because the plate is so full.
Diabetes
Children with type 2 diabetes have a parent with the condition 60 percent of the time and a parent or grandparent with diabetes 90 percent of the time. Children who have type 2 diabetes tend to be more difficult to manage if one or both parents also have type 2 diabetes.
Their average blood glucose tends to be higher.
Diabetes
Metabolic surgery has been so successful in preventing and reversing diabetes that many surgeons and diabetes specialists consider diabetes a surgical disease. The surgery leads to marked and long-lasting weight reduction. When the effects of metabolic surgery are compared with standard (nonsurgical) care, the results are unequivocal.
Diabetes
No area in nutrition is more controversial for a person with diabetes than carbohydrates. For years, the American Diabetes Association (ADA) told people with diabetes that they should eat 55 to 60 percent of their calories as carbohydrate. Other experts said that amount was too much or too little. The ADA has now modified its recommendation so that it says in the Clinical Practice Recommendations for 2012, "The recommended daily allowance for carbohydrate is 130 grams per day and is based on providing adequate glucose as the required fuel for the central nervous system without reliance on glucose production from ingested protein or fat.
When prediabetes becomes diabetes, the body's blood glucose level registers even higher. The following sections discuss the evidence for diabetes and the symptoms you may experience with diabetes.
Diagnosing diabetes through testing
The standard definition of diabetes mellitus is excessive glucose in a blood sample.
Diabetes, which is excessive glucose in your blood, leads to serious health problems if left untreated.You should follow the American Diabetes Association screening guidelines to get tested for diabetes at the earliest possible time.If you have diabetes, this Cheat Sheet is a handy reference to screening guidelines, rules for living with diabetes, and continuing your diabetes care to better control the disease.
Diabetes
When deciding on treatment for an elderly patient with diabetes, you first have to consider the individual. Does this person have a low life expectancy? Or is this person physiologically young, with the possibility of living for 15 or 20 more years? If the patient is only 65 years old and in relatively good health, he or she has a life expectancy of at least 18 more years — plenty of time to develop complications of diabetes, especially macrovascular disease, eye disease, kidney disease, and nervous system disease.
The incidence of diabetes in the elderly (which is almost always type 2 diabetes) is higher for many reasons, but the main culprit seems to be increasing insulin resistance with aging. Half of the elderly population has prediabetes.
A study in Diabetes Care in August 2008 suggests that the increased insulin resistance associated with aging is due to exactly the same causes as that found in younger people, namely physical inactivity and obesity.
Metabolic surgery isn't for everyone who wants to treat type 2 diabetes. When you have surgery for obesity, you must be committed to lifelong medical follow-up. You must be willing to give up large meals and be determined to lose weight. These sections examine the specific guidelines for you to review before talking about surgery with your doctor.
Diabetes
Like most things, diabetes care hasn’t been left out of the tech revolution. Manufacturers have added technology to their products, especially glucose meters. Here are a few examples you may encounter:
Some meters come with Bluetooth capability. When you do a glucose test, the meter sends the result to any device that it’s paired with, such as your smartphone or your computer.
Diabetes
If your infant or preschooler is diagnosed with diabetes, you may feel overwhelmed. The following information can help you understand that this diagnosis isn't the end of the world — it's the beginning of many years of special care for your child.
Nurturing a diabetic infant
Although type 1 diabetes doesn't usually show up in babies, it can, and you should know what to expect when it does.
Hypoglycemia results from elevated amounts of insulin driving down your blood glucose to low levels, but an extra high dose of insulin or sulfonylurea medication isn't always the culprit. Your blood glucose level is also affected by the amount of food you take in, the amount of fuel (glucose) that you burn for energy, the amount of insulin circulating in your body, and your body's ability to raise glucose by releasing it from the liver or making it from other bodily substances.
All blood glucose meters require a drop of blood, usually from the finger. To get the drop of blood you need to perform a glucose test, you have to use a spring-loaded device that contains a sharp lancet. You push the button of the device, and the lancet springs out and pokes your finger. Devices that allow different depths of penetration are useful for small children.
Your kidneys rid your body of many harmful chemicals and other compounds produced during the process of normal metabolism. Your kidneys act like a filter through which your blood pours, trapping the waste and sending it out in your urine while the normal contents of the blood go back into your bloodstream. They also regulate the salt and water content of your body.
Diabetes
Diabetes is a social disease, which means that you can't continue very long with diabetes without calling on the help and expertise of others. Asking for help is not such a bad thing. People who regularly interact with others seem to live longer and have a higher quality of life.
Discover how to make use of the great resources that are available to people with diabetes.
Diabetes
You may assume that a chronic disease like diabetes leads to a diminished quality of life, but you don't have to settle for anything less than a full and fulfilling life.
Many studies have evaluated the quality-of-life question, and the following sections not only describe what these studies found but also describe my hope that you can take control and ensure that you maintain a high quality of life.
Diabetes
A number of operation choices are available to diabetes patients, all of which are considered safe. Some are more effective than others. The following sections describe a few of the most common.
They're divided into restrictive operations and malabsorptive operations. The restrictive operations reduce the food you can eat but don't interfere with your absorption of food.
Diabetes
As a person with diabetes, you can get insurance for your medical care several ways. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA or Obamacare) has made it possible for many people who didn't have health insurance to have some coverage.
The PPACA signed by President Obama in March 2010 has had profound effects on the ability of the person with diabetes to get affordable medical care.
Insulin shots aren’'t the only drug treatment for diabetes. If your doctor prescribes oral drugs for your diabetes, use this chart to look up the medication names and dosage amounts. Then educate yourself on diabetes medications, their possible side effects, and drug interactions.
ClassBrand NameGeneric NameAverage DoseRange
Sulfonylureas
Glucotrol
glipizide
10 mg
2.
Excluding vegetable sources of protein like soybeans, legumes, nuts, and seeds, protein in your diabetes-friendly diet is usually the muscle of other animals, such as chicken, turkey, beef, or lamb. For this reason, people used to believe that you could build your own muscle by eating lots of another animal's muscle.
Diabetes
The epidemic of obesity, which has spread to children in the United States in the past few decades, has led to a much higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes in children than was ever seen before. As many as one-third of all US children are overweight or obese. However, only a fraction of these children go on to develop diabetes.
Diabetes
In an effort to instantly gratify their stockholders and find the next "billion dollar drug," drug companies seem to have lost sight of their major goal, which is to find drugs that are both effective and safe for the treatment of diabetes. Although some drug companies continue to pursue this goal, many of them are guilty of the following misconduct:
Withholding studies that they have paid for that show that their drugs are not as effective as they claim.
Do you remember what you were doing when you found out that you had diabetes? Unless you were too young to understand, the news was quite a shock. Suddenly you had a condition from which people can die. In fact, many of the feelings that you went through were exactly those of a person learning that he or she is dying.
Diabetes
For the overweight person with type 2 diabetes, any diet that causes some weight loss helps for a time. But you have to ask yourself these questions:
Am I prepared to stay on this diet indefinitely?
Is this diet healthy for me in the long run?
Does it combine all the features I need — namely weight loss, reduction of blood glucose, and reduction of blood fat levels — with palatability and reasonable cost?
Cases of diabetes other than type 1 and type 2 are rare and usually don't cause severe diabetes in the people who have them. But occasionally one of these other types is responsible for a more severe case of diabetes, so you should know that they exist. The following list gives you a brief rundown of the symptoms and causes of other types of diabetes:
Diabetes due to loss or disease of pancreatic tissue: If you have a disease, such as cancer, that necessitates the removal of some of your pancreas, you lose your pancreas's valuable insulin-producing beta cells and your body becomes diabetic.
Diabetes
Around age 10, some children are found to have type 2 diabetes. In 1990, less than 4 percent of children diagnosed with diabetes had type 2. In 2003, the figure had risen to more than 30 percent. In 2007, almost one of every two children with diabetes had type 2 diabetes.
Important differences exist in the way type 1 and type 2 are recognized and treated.
The American Diabetes Association (ADA) updates its guidelines for standards of medical care annually. These are the 2022 guidelines for screening:
People with symptoms of thirst, frequent urination, and weight loss are tested immediately.
Starting at age 35, all people without risk factors should be tested for prediabetes and type 2 diabetes every three years if tests are normal.
Managing diabetes requires regular doctor visits that include standard monitoring of various diabetic factors. Following are guidelines for your diabetes care — like when to see your doctor, what should happen at each visit, when to have lab tests done, and how often to self-monitor blood glucose.
Consistent diabetes management is key; if test results show any change from your history, then you and your doctor can address them before any problem worsens.
Diabetes
Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle disease. Some harmful choices for your lifestyle contributed to your development of type 2 diabetes and some helpful choices will help you control it or prevent it if you don't have it yet. Unlike the people in your life, who can hardly be there with you 24 hours a day, the Internet is only a mouse click away at any time.
Whether you travel for your job or for pleasure, if you need insulin injections for diabetes treatment and must carry syringes and needles, you have to follow the rules of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) if you fly within the United States. Airlines outside the United States may have different rules; check with your airline before you travel overseas.
Diabetes
You wouldn't hesitate to seek help for your physical ailments associated with diabetes, but you may be reluctant to seek help when you can't adjust psychologically to diabetes.
The problem is that sooner or later your psychological maladjustment will ruin any control that you have over your diabetes. And, of course, you won't lead a very pleasant life if you're in a depressed or anxious state all the time.
The risk of losing consciousness due to low blood glucose has led many states and the federal government to limit driving privileges among diabetics. People with diabetes, especially if they’re taking insulin, are subject to evaluation of their fitness to drive. If they lose their license, they may lose their job or their ability to shop or take themselves to appointments, particularly medical appointments or their children to school or after-school activities.
How often you test is determined by the kind of diabetes you have, the kind of treatment you're using, and the level of stability of your blood glucose.
If you have type 1 or type 2 diabetes and you're taking before-meal insulin, you need to test before each meal and at bedtime. The reason for this frequent testing is that you're constantly using this information to make adjustments in your insulin dose.
The Internet hosts more information about diabetes than anyone can digest. Here you can find the best sites to check. You should be able to get answers online to just about any questions that you have, but you must be cautious about the source of the advice. Don’t make any major changes in your diabetes care without checking with your physician.
Diabetes
You may have recently been diagnosed with diabetes or you have a close friend or loved one who has received the diagnosis. Diabetes and prediabetes are serious conditions, but this glossary can help clarify some terms you may encounter. Refer to this glossary on a regular basis whenever you come across unfamiliar terms and words.
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