Each year the American Diabetic Association sponsors an informational campaign to promote healthy eating by providing practical nutrition guidance that focuses on the importance of developing sound eating and exercise habits. The theme for this year is 100 percent "Fad Free." The campaign features learning how to identify a food fad which is a food or diet fad that claims unreasonable or exaggerated benefits. If a diet or product advertises eating only specific foods, nutrient supplements or combinations of foods that may cure disease or offer quick weight loss, it is a fad. Diet fads come and go.

A balanced diet and physical activity are essential to a healthy lifestyle over the long term of your life. Develop an eating plan for the lifelong health. Choose foods sensibly by looking at the big picture because a single food or meal will not make or break a healthy diet. Find your balance between food and physical activity. Exercise does not have to be strenuous to be beneficial.

You're probably aware by now that many customer service calls for American companies are being handled by employees in other countries, particularly India. Not surprisingly, a study conducted by the Delhi Research Diabetic Center has found that Indian employees of such call centers are suffering from increasingly poor health. Even at relatively young ages, they are becoming especially prone to diabetes and illness associated with high blood pressure.

The reason? They are adopting the lifestyle habits of their American counterparts: drinking soda, eating a lot of processed foods, and their lifestyles are highly sedentary in nature. Of course, all that time spent at a desk taking phone calls is not exactly a recipe for a fit and healthy body. It's also a pretty stressful job environment, working at a call center, and researchers have pointed to job stress as a contributing factor to be taken into account. People in India are becoming increasingly worried about the country's spiraling diabetes problem: unfortunately, the case of the call center workers is just the tip of the iceberg.