Want to learn how to break a sweet tooth addiction? That is easy. Well it is easy to say (but actually very hard to do). If you have ever tried to stop eating sugar then you know just how hard it is and new research is showing us exactly why it is so hard to kick the white death out of our diets. While you might have wrestled with your sweet tooth in the past, let me show you how you can knock it down and finally triumph over this pesky troublemaker.

Why is it so Hard to Break a Sweet Tooth Addiction?

Do you want to know why it is hard to break your sweet tooth action? The answer is simple: Because it is a real addiction. Research has shown that sugar addiction is every bit as powerful and hard to kick as addiction to alcohol, smoking, and even hard drugs.

So while you might be kicking yourself for not being strong enough to fight your sweet tooth, you should cut yourself some slack because sugar addiction ranks high on the hard-things-to-kick list.

How You Can Break Your Sweet Tooth Addiction

If you want to break your sweet tooth addiction, the first thing you have to do is stop thinking it is going to be easy. No one tells an alcoholic (or a drug addict) that they can get rid of their addiction easily. Fighting against your sweet tooth will take time and effort and you will be constantly tested in ways that other addictions are not. For example: how many cigarette ads do you see on the television? And how many of your friends think you are crazy to stop eating sugar? We are bombarded with sugar advertisements daily and most people who stop eating sugar feel alone in a world of sugar junkies. So, take your addiction seriously and understand it is going to be hard.

The second way to succeed in kicking your sugar addiction is find some support. There are many ways to find the support that you need. The best support comes from friends or family members who want to go on a sugar-free holiday with you, but there are also groups on Facebook or other web-based sites that can help you as well.

I have a 30 Day Program called the 30 Sugar Free Days that helps people get off of sugar. Check it out here: 30 Sugar Free Days. You can break your sweet tooth addiction, but it will take time. Breaking your sugar addiction is well worth the effort as you will likely lose weight and feel much better.

Related Posts

• Why Does Sugar Give Me a Headache? (34)
• Sugar Detox (0)
• Diet Success Stories (2)
• Insulin Resistance (2)
• Best way to lose weight fast (3)

Does eating sugar give you a headache? The sugar headache, otherwise known as the Holliday Headache (because we eat so much sugar on Easter, Halloween, Christmas and other holidays) has a lot in common with a hangover headache but it strikes any time year when we overdo sugar.

While most have experienced a sugar headache at some time in their lives it is not well known in medical circles. It might even surprise you to learn that the exact causes of all headaches are a bit of a mystery. Migraines and cluster headaches are thought to be vascular (having to do with blood flow) but how blood changes create a headache is unknown; the same is true of the sugar headache.

I view the sugar headache as a toxicity or dehydration event and while it might be an annoyance it could also be the sign of something more dangerous. Let’s look at dehydration ad toxicity and see how they might cause a headache.

Sugar Dehydration

Dehydration is a common way to get a headache and sugar can lead to dehydration. Eating too much sugar dehydrates your body in two ways.

• Dilution: When you eat too much sugar, your body has to dilute that sugar to keep it from harming your body. This means that water is being pulled from all parts of your body to balance the large amount of sugar in your blood stream. While this water-pulling effect happens all over the body, it is your head that suffers the most.

• Urination: One of the ways that your body has of getting rid of excess sugar is to dump it in your urine. This is especially true of diabetics, who have to go to the bathroom a lot.

Toxicity

The other way to think about sugar is to consider it a toxic event. While your body runs on glucose (a simple sugar) it was never meant to have a ton of simple sugars running around in the blood. If you look to nature, you would find that there are almost no foods that contain the high amount of sugar you would find in a soda or piece of cake. If natural foods do contain a high amount of sugar it is often bound up and hard to get to (like in a sugar cane). The only way to get a large amount of sugar into your body is to have that sugar processed before you put it in your mouth. Processed sugar or processed grains both act like sugar in your body and this is toxic to the very blood cells that carry the sugar throughout the body. (I explain this at length in my book Sugarettes).

Something Worse?

Sugar headaches can also be a warning. If you get sugar headaches often, you might just be diabetic or pre-diabetic. The best way to find out if you are diabetic is to go and see your doctor and have them run some blood tests, but here are the typical symptoms of diabetes:

• Excessive urination: As I mentioned above, sugar acts like a diuretic and will spill sugar and water into the urine. Having to urinate a lot is often one of the first signs of diabetes.
• Excessive thirst: Since diabetics are losing a lot of water (see above), they are often thirsty all the time.
• Excessive hunger: Everyone has periods of time when they are hungry, but diabetics are hungry all the time (with strong cravings for carbohydrates, sweets and sugar). This is one of the strange things about diabetics: They have a lot of sugar in their bodies, but it is not being used by the cells so they are hungry all the time.

Sugar Headache

The reasons why sugar gives you a headache are many and not readily understood. But you don’t have to wait for a reason to stop the pain in your head.

You can stop your sugar headaches and give sugar the boot by trying my 30 Sugar Free Days Program. During the program, you will learn about foods that act like sugar and what you can do about your cravings. Make sure you understand that sugar is doing more harm to your body than just giving you a sugar headache, take this opportunity to learn from your headache that you shouldn’t be putting large amounts of sugar in your mouth and you need to make a change.

Related Posts

• How to Break a Sweet Tooth Addiction (0)
• Insulin Resistance (2)
• Diet Success Stories (2)
• Sugar Detox (0)
• Best way to lose weight fast (3)

Metabolic syndrome is not really a disease but a syndrome and what I would call a “pre-disease” or a condition that you get before you get really sick. Metabolic syndrome is also known as syndrome X, or metabolic syndrome X, or even insulin resistance syndrome.

There are four primary symptoms of metabolic syndrome: central obesity, insulin resistance, hypertension, dyslipidemia (all explained below). Having metabolic syndrome brings with it a risk for other diseases (mostly heart disease, stroke, and type-2 diabetes) and the potential for a shortened life.

The most important thing to know about metabolic syndrome, though, is that it acts like a canary in a coal mine warning you that you are at risk for much worse things to come (that is, if you don’t stop it in its tracks). The good news is that you can change what you are doing right now and avoid much of the pain that comes with having diabetes or heart disease.

Symptoms of Metabolic Syndrome

How do you know if you have metabolic syndrome? While the definitions for metabolic syndrome change from medical group to medical group, most groups agree on the following definition for the syndrome:

• Central Obesity: Central obesity (see picture on this page) is where most of the fat that you carry is about your center or stomach. The other major way to carry extra weight is considered pear shape (where excess fat surrounds the waist) and is not associated with metabolic syndrome. Waist measurements usually determine central obesity with measurements of over 40 inches (102 cm) for men or over 35 inches (88 cm) for women.

• Insulin resistance: Insulin resistance is where the cells of your body are resistant to insulin. Diabetes is a condition where the cells are very resistant to insulin, but there are all sorts of grades of insulin resistance before diabetes. Usually people start out somewhat insulin resistant and then it gets worse as times progresses. Insulin resistance can be measured by a fasting glucose more than 100 mg/dL (or you are taking blood sugar medications). Read more about insulin resistance here: Insulin Resistance

• Dyslipidemia:  Dyslipidemia is a state where your blood fats are either too high or too low. You are familiar with many of these blood fats such as cholesterol and triglycerides. Dyslipidemia in metabolic syndrome usually is defined as having high triglycerides (over 150 mg/dL) and a low HDL cholesterol (less than 40 mg/dL for men and less than 50 mg/dL for women).

• Hypertension: Hypertension or high blood pressure greater than 130 systolic (top number) and 90 diastolic (bottom number).

What Can You do About Metabolic Syndrome?

If you are wondering what you can do about metabolic syndrome, the answer is a lot! While you might be looking for a pill that you can take, that is not your answer. The only way to change metabolic syndrome is to change what you are eating and how much you are exercising.

Here is my plan for stopping metabolic syndrome:

• Stop eating sugar: Okay, I know this is easier said than done, but you have to kick your sugar habit. I have a plan for kicking sugar (and foods that act like sugar) and you can take a look at it here: 30 Sugar Free Days.

• Exercise: You need to get at least 20 minutes, but more like 40 minutes of intense exercise in a day. Pick something like biking, swimming, running or other consistent exercise and practice it every day.

• Eat More Vegetables: Every chance you get you should put something fresh into your mouth. Find a way to incorporate vegetables into every meal you eat (yes, even breakfast).

Metabolic syndrome may seem like a one-way dead end street to heart disease and diabetes, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Change what you are doing today and you can change who you are (and maybe how long you are going to live).

Related Posts

• Insulin Resistance (2)
• Diet Success Stories (2)
• How to Break a Sweet Tooth Addiction (0)
• Why Does Sugar Give Me a Headache? (34)
• How Many Calories Should I Eat to Lose Weight? (1)

Insulin resistance is a modern day problem that is the result of eating modern day foods. What insulin resistance means is that the cells in your body are resistant to insulin. While this may not sound like a big deal, it is. The more insulin resistant your cells become, the high your blood sugar rises (and your body hates high blood sugar). Let’s take a look at just how insulin resistance happens in your body.

How Insulin Resistance Forms

If your blood sugar shoots up high occasionally, there is really no problem. The problem comes when your blood sugar is high over a long period of time or high blood sugar happens every day. To understand this, you have to understand what is happening in the cells of your body.

The cells in your body only want so much sugar; they just want enough sugar to do their jobs. When there is constantly too much insulin and too much sugar in the blood stream (like when you eat sugar at every meal) the only response that the cells have is to remove the doorways (receptors) from the outside of the cell. This process is called down-regulation of receptors. When insulin receptors disappear throughout the body, it creates a whole-body effect called “insulin resistance,” meaning the cells of the body become “resistant” to insulin.

Let’s take a look at what happens to the cell when the body removes receptors, in the following diagram the yellow represents the cell and the blue thingies are the receptors.

A cell goes from having this many receptors (normal):

To having, say, this many:

Now, this is a bit tricky to understand, but imagine if all the cells in your body began to respond to too much sugar by removing their insulin receptors. If every cell in the body removed its receptors, the doorways to sugar, what would happen? The end result would be that you’d have more sugar in your blood.

Why?

Remember that insulin used to be able to push sugar out of the blood stream and put it into the cells. The cells, though, are now getting rid of receptors because there is too much sugar around most of the time. The cells are becoming resistant to insulin. So, even though there is sugar in the blood stream and a lot of insulin, the sugar has no where to go because the cells won’t allow it in. So, now, where does the sugar go? It stays in the blood stream.

But you also have to remember, more sugar in the blood stream creates what? The answer is more sugar in the blood stream leads to more insulin. When your body becomes insulin resistant, the next time you eat a meal, you have a higher amount of sugar in your blood because the cells are refusing to take on that sugar. So, more sugar in the blood stream means that the body will now release more insulin. Do you see the vicious cycle that is starting to develop? More insulin circulating in the body will eventually lead to fewer receptors on cells, which will lead to more sugar in the blood, and more insulin, and fewer receptors and…you get the idea.

Cells will eventually look like this as they get rid of even more receptors:

Now you understand how insulin resistance can develop from eating a high amount of sugar every day. The association between eating sugars and the creation of insulin resistance is, however, far from being a proven phenomenon in human beings. Animal studies demonstrate a relationship between eating sugars and foods that act like sugar and the development of insulin resistance,[i]^,[ii] but the medical community is far from convinced. Like much of the scientific study on sugar and health, much more research is needed.

Over Time

Okay. Let’s see if we can pull this all together. Watch what happens over time, not to the individual cell, but in the whole body. The following chart shows how blood sugar and insulin react to each other and how insulin resistance builds over time when you are consuming sugar foods. (click on the image below to see full size).

What happens over time with insulin resistance is that the body can no longer produce enough insulin and, eventually, insulin production fails. When the body can no longer produce enough insulin or the cells have become resistant to insulin, your body is no longer able to keep blood sugar within a narrow range. This is called diabetes, a situation where the blood sugar is very high.

What Can You Do?

There is a lot that you can do to avoid insulin resistance, the chief among these is to stop eating sugar and foods that act like sugar. I have program called the 30 Sugar Free Days Program where you can join with other people who are giving sugar the boot.

Besides stopping the sugar feast, you can exercise, lower the amount of saturated fat in your diet and eat as many vegetables as you can. Insulin resistance is not a death sentence, but a wake-up call. There is a lot you can do to stop and reverse insulin resistance, but you have to get moving today.

[ii] Daly M: Sugars, insulin sensitivity, and the postprandial state. Am J Clin Nutr. 2003 Oct;78(4):865S-872S.

Related Posts

• Why Does Sugar Give Me a Headache? (34)
• Metabolic Syndrome (0)
• Sugar Detox (0)
• Best Drug Ever: Exercise (6)
• Diet Success Stories (2)

How do you feel these days? If you feel a bit sluggish, tired, bloated, fuzzy in the head, have headaches, belly aches, or just don’t feel right then it may be time for a sugar detox. Sugar is everywhere (even in foods you don’t suspect, see: Hidden Sugars) and it is hard work doing a sugar detox and avoiding the white stuff all together. But a sugar detox is well worth the effort if you want to lose a few pounds and get back to feeling like your old self again.

Why is Sugar a Problem?

Oh sugar, you cause so many problems, let me count the ways:

1. Addictive: As you might have guessed, sugar is addictive. But what you may not have guessed is just how addictive sugar can be. When scientists test rats addicted to sugar they find that the addiction to sugar is just as strong as other addictions (like cigarettes, alcohol and even hard drugs). If you doubt this, try staying away from all sugar for just one day and you will see what a powerful hold that white stuff has over you. When you do a sugar detox you have to battle your addictions.
2. Health Problems: While many people in the medical community think that eating even large amounts of sugar is no problem, research is now showing that sugar is at least partially responsible for diabetes, heart disease, obesity and maybe even some cancers.
3. Weight Gain: The more sugar you eat, the more you are going weigh. The reason for this is that your body doesn’t want to waste the energy that you eat. Your body only needs so much fuel and when you eat too much sugar it is going to store all that extra energy as fat. Most people who go on a sugar detox lose a lot of weight.
4. Hurts Your Brain: Sugar is responsible for that fuzzy thinking you get in the middle of the day and can lead to headaches, problems focusing and maybe even depression. (see: What Sugar Does to Your Brain)

How to do a Sugar Detox

Going on a sugar detox is easy, right? All you have to do is stop eating all sugar. Well… it is easy to say you should do a sugar detox but much harder to actually do.

There are two obstacles that you have to overcome when you do a sugar detox.

• The first is the addictive nature of sugar. The bad news about a sugar detox is that the cravings that come when you stop eating sugar are incredibly powerful. But here is the good news: it gets easier. It really gets easier if you have support from friends and family. Most people who go through a sugar detox find that the first few days are hard and then they feel better than they have in a while.

• The second is that kicking sugar alone is not enough, you also have to stop eating the foods that act like sugar. The reason for this is that many foods you eat raise your blood sugar more than eating table sugar; so to truly detox from sugar you have to avoid the foods that act like sugar to (see: Foods that act Like Sugar).

I have created a program called the 30 Sugar Free Days Program that will help you with your sugar detox. The program includes daily e-mails and has a group on Facebook for the support that you need. The program is designed to help you stay away from both sugar and the foods that act like sugar.

Yes, a sugar detox is not easy, but it is well worth the effort and you will feel better than you have in a while once you given sugar a kick out the door.

Related Posts

• How to Break a Sweet Tooth Addiction (0)
• Insulin Resistance (2)
• Diet Success Stories (2)
• Why Does Sugar Give Me a Headache? (34)
• Best Drug Ever: Exercise (6)

Low glycemic foods are the best foods to eat if you are trying to control your blood sugar, but it also works well to eat low glycemic foods if your goal is weight loss.

But just what are low glycemic foods?

The Glycemic Index

The glycemic index is a listing of foods and how each of those foods increases our blood sugar. As you might imagine, eating straight sugar increases your blood sugar but here is the strange thing: other foods increase your blood sugar too (some even more than eating straight sugar).

The glycemic index came about when a scientist decided to check someone’s blood sugar and then give them a single food and then test to see what that food did to their blood sugar. It is a simple enough experiment, but it yielded some surprising results. Foods that we thought would increase blood sugar did, but some of those foods act more sugary that sugar itself. Part of this has to do with what we are measuring and part of it has to do with how readily available the sugars in foods are when we eat them.

Here is a breakdown of a typical glycemic index chart:

What you will notice about the chart is that most of high and medium glycemic index foods are grains, sugars and simple starches. These are the foods you want to avoid

Low Glycemic Foods

Here is the list of the some of the low glycemic foods (for a database, go to www.glycemicindex.com )

GRAINS

• Pearl barley

Grain Products

• Fettuccine, egg
• Lasagna
• Linguine
• Macaroni
• Ravioli
• Spaghetti

FRUITS (RAW)

• Apple
• Blackberries
• Blueberries
• Cherries
• Dried apricots
• Grapes
• Kiwi fruit
• Mango
• Orange
• Peach
• Pear
• Pineapple
• Plums
• Raspberries
• Strawberries

VEGETABLES

• Avocados
• Broccoli
• Brussels sprouts
• Cabbage
• Carrots, raw
• Cauliflower
• Celery
• Chard
• Eggplant
• Garlic
• Kale
• Onions
• Radish
• Sprouts
• Squash (most)
• Tomato Juice
• Tomato soup
• Tomatoes
• Yam (Canada)

Lettuce of all kinds

• Green leaf
• Iceberg
• Red leaf
• Romaine

Mixed greens

• Arugula
• Beet greens
• Collard Greens
• Dandelion greens
• Endive
• Escarole
• Radicchio
• Red mustard
• Spinach

BEANS

• Baked Beans
• Black eyed beans
• Chickpeas (Garbanzo beans)
• Hummus (chickpea salad dip)
• Lentils, red
• Pinto beans
• Red Kidney Beans
• Romano beans
• Soya beans

DAIRY

• Full-fat cows’ milk
• Cheese (most)

NUTS AND SEEDS

• Almonds
• Cashews
• Macadamia
• Mixed nuts
• Peanut butter (no sugar)
• Peanuts
• Pecans
• Pistachio
• Sunflower seeds
• Walnuts

PROTEIN

• Beef
• Chicken
• Eggs
• Fish
• Pork
• Poultry (all)
• Sausages
• Wild game

MUSHROOMS

• Maitake
• Reishi
• Shitake

Related Posts

• Diet Success Stories (2)
• Why Does Sugar Give Me a Headache? (34)
• Insulin Resistance (2)
• Sugar Free Diet for Diabetics (0)
• What is Eating Below the Glycemic Index? (11)

If you ask most medical doctors or even established associations such as the American Diabetes Association (see Diabetes Myths) you will find that they think that eating sugar has nothing to do with diabetes. To most people it seems mind bogglingly simple to connect a sugar control problem (diabetes) with eating too much sugar but the medical community just can’t seem to make that leap.

For the rest of us that live on planet reality it is obvious that eating sugar can cause diabetes. How do we know that? Because humans that don’t have access to purified white sugar or foods that act like sugar simply don’t have diabetes. If you look around the globe, you see that people who are unlucky enough to be able to go to the store and pick up a bag of sugar (or get a soda, or buy a bag of chips) are the same people who have diabetes.

A sugar free diet for your diabetes will not only help you, but can dramatically reduce or eliminate your need for medications.

White Sugar

The image you have to get into your head about white sugar is that it is the 100-proof vodka of foods. When you pick up a bag of sugar and the label says that it is almost 99 percent sucrose (and nothing else), that means that your sugar has been so refined that there is nothing else in that bag but pure sucrose. No food this pure exists on the earth until human hands purify it. White sugar is like a drug – only more pure than any you would find on the streets.

But here is the problem.

You can remove all the sugar you want from your diet but if you don’t also remove the foods that act just like sugar in your body then you are not doing yourself any good. What are the foods that act like sugar? They are foods such as bread, crackers, chips and certain fruits and vegetables and they all act just like eating sugar. Want to learn more? Check out my article on the foods that act like sugar.

How to Go Sugar Free

If you are going to do a sugar free diet for diabetics then you are going to need some help.

First let me caution you that changing the way that you eat (especially if you remove sugars and foods that act like sugar) can dramatically change your blood sugar. This is no problem if you are not on medications for your diabetes, but if you are taking medications for blood sugar control then you can put yourself in a dangerous position by simply eating better. Let me suggest that you work with your doctor or health care provider if you are taking diabetic medications and you are going to change your diet.

I find that the easiest way to change your diet is to follow a plan and I have a 30 Sugar Free Days Program that you are welcome to join (there is free version) and try going 30 days without sugar and foods that act like sugar.

Take the plunge and try the 30 sugar free days challenge:

Related Posts

• Diet Success Stories (2)
• How to Break a Sweet Tooth Addiction (0)
• Why Does Sugar Give Me a Headache? (34)
• Insulin Resistance (2)
• Want to Live Longer? You Have to Look Further (0)

All this is good advice, but there is really only one thing you have to do to improve the chances that you will live longer: Look further down the road.

Looking Further

You spend your days making decisions. You decide to get out of bed, what to eat for breakfast, what clothes you are gong to wear during the day… Many of these decisions are automatic such as brushing your teeth, wearing a seatbelt, scratching your head. And each of those decisions , no matter how minor,  has an impact on your life. Some have a small impact on your life. Other decisions have more impact such as: should you move? should you marry? should you take that job?

The most important decisions you make, though, are the ones that appear to have little impact on your life when taken as a one-time event, but when repeated over a whole lifetime, have a huge impact.

Take a look:

• One cigarette means nothing to your health, but a pack of cigarettes a day for years equal cancer.
• One soda is a tasty treat, three sodas a day means a bigger chance for being overweight and having diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease…
• Driving in a car is the easy way to get to the store, walking instead of driving every day means you live longer.
• You may be too busy to call a friend back, but having good friends means you are more likely to live a longer and fuller life.
• You can’t find the time to exercise today, but exercises over a lifetime gives you energy, better sleep and can forestall diseases such as dementia, heart disease, diabetes and more.

There are more of these you can probably think of, consider adding yours to the comment section below!

Our Brains

Here is the problem: our brains are not set up to look further down the road. Are brains are set up to notice sudden and dramatic threats and adjust to them. If people took a puff from a cigarette and fell down dead, then we would avoid them. But since they kill us slowly, we seem to hardly notice the destruction because it is so slow. The same is true of sugar and other poor foods that we eat. The same is true about deciding to exercise, or take time with friends or the hundred of other healthy things we could be doing.

Humans are unique, though, in the fact that they can see further down the road, they can look at their futures.

Here is what you should commit to in order to increase your odds of staying on the earth longer:

• Eat better: I suggest Eating Below the Glycemic Index you can also try my 30 Sugar Free Days as a way to kick start a healthy eating plan.
• Exercise: Move your body around every day, sweat a little.
• Make Connections: Connect to friends, family and other social groups.
• Laugh: If you are not enjoying life, what is the point?

Take the time to develop habits that empower you and lean you towards better health, the payback is well worth the effort.

Related Posts

• Insulin Resistance (2)
• Sugar Free Diet for Diabetics (0)
• What Sugar Does to Your Brain (24)
• Diet Success Stories (2)
• How to Break a Sweet Tooth Addiction (0)

Her latest book, The Calcium Lie: What Your Doctor Doesn’t Know Could Kill You covers the many problems that calcium creates.

Startling new statistics on diabetes released by the National Institutes of Health this week show that the rates of diabetes and impaired blood sugar in American are increasing at alarming levels.

Nearly 13% of American aged 20 and over have diabetes, but 40% of them don’t know it. This puts them at high risk for the tragic side effects of diabetes, including heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, blindness, impaired circulation that can lead to amputations and more.

If that’s not gloomy enough for you, consider this: From 1995 to 1997, there were 4.8 new cases of Type 2 diabetes per 1,000 Americans. Ten years later, that rate had increased by 89% to 9.1 new cases per 1,000 Americans.

Worse yet, 36% of men and 23% of women and 16% of teenagers have “pre-diabetes,” says the NIH.

The term “pre-diabetes” is a con. It means that you have impaired blood glucose function and without drastic measures, you will soon have diabetes and all of its ugly companion diseases. It lulls too many patients into complacency.

It’s even more frightening when you consider the number of teenagers who are being diagnosed with diabetes or more benign-sounding “pre-diabetes.” The disease now known as Type 2 diabetes was once known as adult onset diabetes.

Diabetes was once the province of senior citizens. The dread companion diseases are more-or less accepted turf there. But there is something inherently wrong when we think of obese teenagers with arterial blockages, having heart attacks at 30 and bypasses at 35, if they survive that long. Just think about where these poor kids will be when they’re 40.

These statistics aren’t just numbers, folks. They are our mothers, father, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives and, sadly, our children. They are real people and this illness takes a toll on everyone around someone with diabetes.

This a tragedy of national proportions. Diabetes is a terrible disease. There are no two ways about it. Once you’re diagnosed, the changes of reversing diabetes are diminished. The chances of controlling it are better. But the best bet is prevention.

How can you prevent diabetes?

1. Stay away from sugar and foods with hidden sugar: This is a good start, but it’s not the entire answer.
2. Control your weight: Most of us know that obesity is a factor in almost all cases of Type 2 diabetes. Studies also show that just losing 10% of your body weight can dramatically lower blood sugars.
3. Exercise is another key factor in diabetes management and prevention., not only for the obvious reasons. Muscle activity actually helps your body to better use the insulin that your pancreas is producing.
4. Know your mineral status and correct mineral imbalances to help prevent a downward spiral of metabolic problems that lead to diabetes and a host of other health problems, according to Robert Thompson, M.D., with whom I wrote The Calcium Lie: What Your Doctor Doesn’t Know Could Kill You (InTruth Press, 2008). Learn your mineral status by getting a hair tissue mineral analysis and following the recommendations tailored to your specific needs.

Finally, do what ever it takes to fend off the diabetes monster. It is one of the most terrible diseases we face and one of the most preventable. It’s up to you.

–Kathleen Barnes

http://www.kathleenbarnes.com

Twitter: @KathleenSBarnes

Related Posts

• How to Break a Sweet Tooth Addiction (0)
• Why Does Sugar Give Me a Headache? (34)
• Metabolic Syndrome (0)
• Insulin Resistance (2)
• Sugar Detox (0)

The reason why the history of health is interesting is that what people worry about has changed over time. Ask someone 200 years ago what health concerns they have and you would hear them say that they fear some sort of accident or infection. The reason why they feared accidents and infections is because most people died from infections or injuries 200 years ago.

What is remarkable when you ask that same question of people today is that, while infection is a worry for us to, it is a small concern compared to our fear of cancer or heart disease or a dementia like Alzheimer’s. This dramatic shift in our health concerns has happened in the last 100 years and I’m not sure most people are aware of it or what it means about where you turn for health care or how it should change the choices you make every day.

The Nobel Battle

For most of human history, the battle for health has been a battle over infection and sudden illness. This is a battle that modern medicine has waged well and has, for the most part, won. The introduction of wonder drugs like antibiotics, steroids, anti-inflammatories and more were a boon to our health and longevity. While there is a great debate about just how much these drugs have done for our health and longevity, it is pretty clear that the wonder drugs did play a role in the improvement of our health. Yes, improved sanitation and food handling have reduced infectious disease, but the drugs, too, have played an important role.

Combine the change in sanitation, the introduction of emergency medicine to deal with accidents, and powerful drugs and you change the average life expectancy from around 40 or 50 years old 100 years ago to around 78 today. Quite an accomplishment.

Out goes the era of infections and sudden diseases and in comes the modern age with new health challenges.

Enter the Era of Slow Diseases

Slow diseases are completely different from sudden diseases like infection and accidents. No longer are we terrified about getting the plague or other infectious disease, we are now mostly concerned about cancer, diabetes, heart disease. These new fears reflect the reality. Yes, there is AIDS, bird flu and other infectious diseases, but your risk of dying from one of those infectious diseases is small compared to the risk that you are going to die from a disease that slowly creeps up on you.

You currently have a 1 in 5 risk of dying from heart disease and about a one in seven chance of dying form cancer.

But these slow diseases are fundamentally different from the diseases of previous generations and require you to think and act differently.

To understand why you have to think differently, you have to remember the frog in the pot of boiling water. Many people have heard about the story of the frog in the hot water: If you put a frog in some very hot water, it will jump right out, but if you put him in cold water and slowly bring it to a boil he will die. The diseases we face are exactly like the slowly boiling water: they are slow that it is not apparent that we are in danger until it is too late.

Confusing the Role of Medicine

I  think the biggest problem people have when they have a slow disease is confusing the role of medicine and drug therapy. If you have an sudden injury, acute infection, then standard medicine is the way go. But when you have a slow disease, your approach has to be different. Yes, you can go to traditional medicine if you have something like arthritis, and they can help your pain go away, but the medicines they are giving you do nothing to address the underlying cause of the disease. You may feel better, but that feeling is not going to last, as the drugs either have side-effects that are worse than the disease, or they stop being effective.

Slow diseases require a different approach and a different attitude on your part. I’m sorry to say this to you if you don’t know it, but medicine is never going to find a cure for cancer, or multiple sclerosis, or diabetes, or heart disease or hundred of other slow-developing diseases. I know you want to believe that medicine will cure everything (and I would like to too) but these diseases do not lend themselves to being cured by a pill. The body is just too complex and the drug solution not helpful enough.

I’m not alone is saying this, even the American Diabetes Association, American Heart Association, American Cancer Society would agree: you can prevent up to 70 percent of these diseases by changing your diet and your habits.

Change Your Approach

Since the chances you are going to be faced with a slow disease are much higher than an acute or sudden disease, you have to change your approach to health care. Your health is in your hands. The small little things you do every day are important. Taking the stairs instead of an elevator, choosing to avoid soda and sugars, getting enough sleep, maintaining a regular health regime… all these are important.

You cannot wait for medicine to cure the diseases you will have in the future; that help will never come. You have to pay attention to the temperature of the water around you and jump out of the pot before it starts boiling instead of waiting until tomorrow to start changing. There is no more powerful thing that you can do then to change your habits and improve your health.

Related Posts

• Health News Digest 12/17/2008 (2)
• Best Drug Ever: Exercise (6)
• Insulin Resistance (2)
• Sugar Detox (0)
• Why Fruits and Vegetables are Good for You (2)