You've heard about the sports stars and the rock stars who succeed in life despite suffering from diabetes. Now, here's something a little more unusual: a circus acrobat! Dolly Jacobs is Circus Sarasota's "Queen of the Air." She recently gave an interview to the Bradenton Herald about her life in the circus.

Trim and petite like a dancer, Jacobs was diagnosed ten years ago. How did it happen? She had the warning signs most type 1s experience: weight loss and a killer thirst she just could not quench. Her mom already had type 1, so during a routine office visit, Jacobs asked the doc to check her blood sugar too. Whoa. It was 260 - way, way above normal. Jacobs was diagnosed not with type 1, but with a rarer form sometimes dubbed "type 1.5" or Latent Autoimmune Diabetes of the Adult (LADA). LADA is basically the same as type 1 diabetes, but develops later in life.

So how does one deal with diabetes when your job involves flying through the air with the greatest of ease? Low blood sugar is easy, says Jacobs. Correct it with a soda or juice. High blood sugar is tougher. She says she can go as high as 500 or 600 just from adrenaline. So, just like any other athlete, she depends on testing several times daily and she wears an insulin pump - but not when she's performing. Eating healthy - lean meats, fruits and veg - are important too, she says.

Click here to read more. Kudos, by the way, to the journalist who wrote this article, Roberta C. Nelson, for taking time out to identify the different forms of diabetes and to explain the dangers associated with high vs. low blood sugar. Great!

Not too long ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with David Kliff, of Diabetic Investor. When diabetes came knocking on David's door - he took the higher road, literally, and many would agree he has made the most of it.

David created Diabetic Investor to share his opinion as a leading authority on the business of diabetes from the unique perspective of a diabetic. Along the way he has gained interest in leading-edge technologies and breakthrough medicines to enhance the treatment of diabetes. His research and his craft for controlling his diabetes has significantly impacted his health for the best - and it keeps getting better.

David is now a marathon runner. His training efforts have resulted in a resounding 45 pound weight loss, cutting his insulin dose substantially, and improving his overall health. He launched a blog to promote his participation in the New York City Marathon this November. Checkout Dave's Run for Diabetes, and show your support for his efforts to go the distance for diabetes - all 26.2 miles!

Shhh. Big Pharma scientists hard at work. On what, you ask? Why, on Novo's new "baby" - a drug designed to treat type 2 diabetes. Liraglutide, a hormone analogue, is supposed to improve blood sugar control. It's also supposed to get you that coveted magic bullet (a la Byetta): weight loss. Ooh, baby. Now that's medication!

Novo Nordisk has been working on Liraglutide for a while now. Here's the latest: Novo announced Monday that two Phase III studies were successful in demonstrating the aforementioned blood sugar control and weight reduction. Novo is riding high on the news: its shares rose six percent on the announcement. According to a pharmaceutical industry analyst quoted by Reuters, the shares surged so healthily because the positive news was expected.

The powers-that-be at the drug giant say they hope Liraglutide can be submitted for regulatory approval by mid-2008. They hope it will become another blockbuster, with estimated annual sales topping one billion. Stay tuned.

Drug companies are very good at making it seem like taking a certain medication or supplement will be a panacea for just about everything that ails you. Even at the end of their commercials, when they're rattling off a whole host of possible unwanted side effects, the person on-screen is still smiling, riding or a horse, swinging on a swing in slow-motion, or something just as cheery. And while there are many amazing drugs out there that do help people a great deal, there are also many out there that are no more than snake oils.

Case in point, I just came across this supposed interview (it looks kind of staged to me) on YouTube, featuring a doctor who claims that type 2 and type 1 diabetes can be miraculously cured by drinking alkaline water. A bunch of B.S.? Honestly, I hope it's not! But, it probably is. So, instead of relying on miracle drugs and supplements, here are two very easy ways to address issues commonly faced by many people living with diabetes:

1 - Weight Loss. Very often, doctors will recommend that their patients with type 2 lose weight, hoping that this may lead to a lower A1C and improved overall health. So, instead of trying out Alli or any other popular weight loss drug on the market, try this little weight loss tip. Whenever you go out to dinner, eat a cup of broth-based soup (i.e. chicken, tomato) as an appetizer. New research into people's restaurant eating habits shows that people who consume a cup of soup as an appetizer tend to eat 20-percent less of their entree. The key is to stay away from cream soups of any kind, and to opt for a cup rather than a bowl. You may also want to add a little chili powder, especially since capsaicin, the compound found in chili pepper, has been shown in lab tests to actually kill fat cells.

2 - Lower Blood Pressure. People with diabetes must stay on top of their blood pressure, as an elevated level is rather common among those with both type 1 and type 2. While there are many trusted medications available to treat high blood pressure, you may also want to consider eating pistachio nuts. Penn State nutritionists discovered that eating one and a half ounces of pistachios daily for one month helped keep test subjects' blood pressure down. What's more, eating three ounces per day also showed signs of arterial relaxation, allowing better blood flow and making the heart's job that much easier.

Diabetics who are familiar with the glycemic index have an easier time discerning how certain foods will affect their blood sugar. The principle of the glycemic index is based on a 1 to 100 scale, with pure glucose being 100. A food GI is measured by how much it will raise blood sugar in a 2 hour span.

The glycemic index (GI) underlying theme is a low-sugar, high-fiber, plant-based diet. Most GI lists categorize foods into three groups: Low (less than 55), Medium (55-69), and High (over 70) GI foods. Low GI foods will stimulate the least blood glucose and are presumably better to eat. Vegetables generally are low GI. Foods with lots of sugar have higher values. The GI theory is not cut and dry. Certain factors will skew results, for example: eating protein. Protein will slow the abortion of glucose into the blood. This rule also holds true for fat.

Curious how a low glycemic diet might work for you? Fifty50 wants to help you achieve optimal blood sugar control. They have created a step-by-step experiment that shows how a high glycemic meal will affect a blood sugar, in relation to a low glycemic meal. Check it out and see for yourself is this GI thing is worth mastering.

That's Fit did a great piece featuring the benefits fiber adds to most of our diets. In fact, the FDA recommends we eat 25 to 30 grams a day when most of us are eating less than half that amount!

Even Oprah is praising the nutritious secrets of fiber. Her helping hand, Dr. Oz, has written it all down for you in his latest book, YOU on a Diet. Oprah has featured the YOU: On a Diet Basics in a slide show on her site.

The slide show compels me to brave Borders again (at least this time I might not have to navigate swarms of Harry Potter fanatics). YOU: On a Diet promises to invigorate me with equal parts information, motivation, and change-your-life action that will harmoniously direct my body into wellness. After all - this is the doctor who has helped Oprah look like a daytime supermodel. I'm sold!

Ever noticed that people tend to be around the same weight as spouses and friends? Well, it's not your imagination. A study just out in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that obesity, a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes, acts somewhat like a contagious disease - so when one person puts on weight, others around them follow suit. This, the researchers say, helps explain why Americans have gotten so fat in recent decades.

The study, a summary and discussion of which is featured in The New York Times, involved the analysis of a social network of 12,067 people over a period of thirty-two years (from 1971 to 2003). Researchers tracked not only the health and weight loss/gain of these people, but also who knew whom, who was friends with whom, and who was related to whom. Over time, it became clear that those whose friends became obese were much more likely to grow obese themselves. The likelihood, in fact, tripled in the case of close friends. Interestingly, friendship mattered more as a determining factor than did being related or being neighbors with someone.

It works like this: people tend to share the lifestyle habits of their family and friends. Folks who consider salads delightful and who enjoy frequent jogs around the park generally surround themselves with similarly-minded folks, and it shows in their trim physiques. Likewise, fast-food munchers who enjoy lots of TV tend to hang out with a similar crowd...and their thighs - not to mention waistlines, hearts, blood sugar levels etc. - suffer the consequences. Another factor, says researcher Nicholas Christakis, is the perception of the self in relation to others: "You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you."

It's often said that serving food on smaller plates makes a diner inclined to eat less. Well, a Canadian researcher decided to put that theory to the test. Sue Pedersen, who is an endocrinologist at the University of Calgary, conducted a study designed to evaluate the efficacy of a specially designed "portion-control plate." The plates, designed by Diet Plate Limited of England, are marked with lines indicating how much of the day's main meal should be divided amongst the various food groups.

For six months, sixty-five study participants ate their food from regular dishes, while sixty-five others ate their food from the portion-control plates. All of the participants were type 2 diabetics and clinically obese. End result? The plates worked quite well at getting subjects to curb their appetites. After six months, those using the plates lost an average of 1.8 percent of their body weight, whereas the control group lost an average of only 0.1 percent. Interestingly, those on insulin regimens did the best of all, with an average of 2.5 percent weight loss.

The fatal flaw? What happens when the white lab coat crew aren't charting your intake any more? Call me a naysayer, but I'm predicting some major snacking in the future of those study subjects. Because special plate or not, you have to have the will to cut portion intake, and it's hard to maintain that will long-term.

The results of Pedersen's study have been published in the Archives of Internal Medicine (June 2007). Check out the Diet Plate website too.

The Master Cleanser Detox raises my curiosity to insatiable levels. Many stars have sworn by it - from Beyonce Knowles to Robin Quivers. The misconception behind the safety of this practice for weight loss is reviewed by a registered dietician on The Diet Channel. The Master Cleanser is by no stretch of the imagination a healthy way to lose weight. In fact, the Master Cleanser, otherwise known as the Lemonade Diet, is a complete body detoxifying cleanse that has been around for over 60 years.

The Master Cleanser is a combination of simple ingredients in different combinations throughout the day: organic sea salt, water, lemons, syrup, cayenne pepper and a laxative tea. The day begins with a quart of salt water, followed by interval consumption of several cups of homemade lemonade throughout the day. The lemonade contains fresh squeezed lemons and water, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup. The lemon juice is said to dissolve built-up waste in the colon (the master cleansing agent); the cayenne pepper is for ridding the body of mucus; and the maple syrup is for energy. The end of the day includes a detoxifier herbal tea laxative. The herbal laxative is to aid the elimination process and the salt water acts as a colonic flush. The author of the original plan recommends following the diet for a minimum of 10 days, but also says that the diet can be followed for up to 20 days.

On Friday I went to Borders to get my hands on a copy of the Mater Cleanser. Big mistake after I realized it was the debut of the latest Harry Potter book. I should've called! In any event - I forfeited fighting Gryffindors and Hogwarts to find the book. I returned home to scour the internet for personal reviews of the Master Cleanser. The most important thing I discovered was that people who use the Master Cleanser to lose weight are misinformed. The Master Cleanser is intended for ultimate toxin elimination - not weight elimination. For entertaining enlightenment - I strongly suggest reading the Amazon.com customer reviews!!

Contrary to what diet experts have now been telling us for over a decade, researchers from Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh have reportedly found that it is not necessary to cut simple sugar (sucrose) from our diets in order to lose weight. In fact, the researchers posit that diets are more strictly adhered to when the dieter consumes small amounts of sucrose on a regular basis.

Writing in the International Journal of Food Science and Nutrition, the researchers stated that the results of their study on the topic showed the greatest reduction in body weight and BMI loss to come from dieters who included sugar in their diet. The researchers further stated that their results "contribute to the growing body of evidence that an effective way to lose weight is by adhering to a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet and by being physically active." They also added "it also provides evidence that the exclusion of sucrose, as is normally advocated in a weight loss diet, is not necessary to achieve weight reduction."

Personally, I feel that that more investigation into these claims need to be made before I start breaking out a Tootsie Roll Pop and washing it down with a Mountain Dew. And, regardless of whether or not there is any merit to this claim, the impact that sucrose has on the blood sugar of people with diabetes remains undesirable. To offer my final two cents, I think that what the researchers discovered is that people who are able to indulge in sweets once and a while are more apt to adhere to their diets. This occasional indulgence (or "reward") satisfies their cravings, making it far easier to stick to their healthy food regimen for the remainder of the time. However, to go as far as to basically imply that it is healthier to regularly consume sucrose than it is to not do so is bit of a stretch.

Gastric bypass surgery was originally devised to cause weight loss in cases of extreme obesity. However, it has recently come to be known as a last resort measure for controlling Type 2 diabetes in obese patients. To read up on this phenomenon, you need look no further than this very site. Here's a previous blog on this topic by yours truly, one that touches on the horrible complications that some have to endure after the surgery. Then here's a more recent one about a Welsh study on the incredible efficacy of the surgery, this time courtesy of Bev.

Now I see a new report circulating in the news. This one focuses on some doctors and their patients who have experienced first-hand how well the gastric bypass can work at making Type 2 diabetes disappear. The piece profiles (among others) truck parts salesman and Type 2 diabetic Adrian Scolari, who weighed 360 pounds and became an insulin-dependent diabetic. Upon having the surgery, says Scolari, his blood sugar levels immediately returned to normal. "I'd have to say it's like a miracle," Scolari exclaims. Bariatric surgeon Nestor De La Cruz Munoz says a gastric bypass can completely rid patients of Type 2 diabetes in a majority of cases. Munoz says, (and Bev talked about this in her blog on this topic too), it appears to be successful because shrinking the stomach's size and rerouting the small intestine affects the production of GLP1 hormone. Result? Instantly normalized blood sugar levels. Obvious next question: can this technique be applied to non-obese patients with Type 2 diabetes? I will look forward to hearing more about this.

Should you want to read more about gastric bypass surgery, WebMD has a good summary of what the procedure involves.

When I was a kid I used to include in my prayers a calculation of how many miles I would have to walk in order to lose enough weight to take less insulin. I never voiced my Forrest Gump like journey aloud - but if I had I would've turned to The Weigh Down Workshop for the faith-based healing I wanted so badly.

Over 1 million people have used faith-based healing for weight loss and freedom from other addictions and drug-dependencies. Featured on the Tyra Banks Show, The Weigh Down Workshop is based on the principal that diets have caused or exacerbated overeating. It has given people false hopes, and then failed them - making most people feel like failures. Weigh Down teaches people to depend on their Creator for help. There truly is a mindset where people have no desire to overeat anymore.

If you believe in our Creator, and you believe that weight loss will help you remove your dependency on Big Pharma pushing drugs unto you - I would love to hear your success story. If you believe it's all a ruse -- I'd love to hear that, too. I heard a lot of Family Radio on my road trip this past week. A lot of questions linger in my head about the Old Testment and things documented in biblical history. One comes to mind with this revelation of faith-based healing -- why did Jesus fast for 40 days and 40 nights?

When it comes to issues of health, perhaps the most encouraging factoid out there is this: you don't have to lose a whole lot of extra weight to experience major health benefits. This info is nothing new, of course. Heck, I remember watching Oprah espouse that very principle on her show back in the 90s. If you can't run, walk, she'd say. If you can't walk far, just walk around the block...or even the front gate. Do something for your health today!

So, what's new on this front, you ask? Well, a major study has now confirmed that modest weight loss can dramatically improve the health of people with Type 2 diabetes. The Look AHEAD (Action for Health in Diabetes) study found that overweight people with Type 2 diabetes who were able to achieve around 7 to 10 percent weight loss over the course of a year experienced the following health benefits: 1.) improved blood sugar control and 2.) a reduced dependence on medications. The study involved over five thousand participants, some of whom were put on the weight-loss regimen, while others received standard medical care (that is, without an emphasis on healthy eating and exercise).

Here's the problem as I see it: how do you transfer these results to everyday life? The participants in this study who lost all that weight did so by agreeing to join the study, and they attended group meetings, ate a specially designed diet, and received advice on exercise and even had sessions with behavioral psychologists. Problem is, there's no behavioral psychologist around when you're alone at home and reaching for that second helping of pasta!

The US weight-loss supplement industry made $3.9 billion in sales last year. With this information The Diet Channel took a good, hard look at the safety and efficacy of diet pills, both over the counter and prescription.

Prescription weight loss pills are heavily regulated and over the counter are not. Some of the prescriptions meds reviewed include: fen-phen, Meridia, and Orlistat. Prescription meds are qualified by their ability to induce 10-20% weight loss in a year. However, both prescription and over-the-counter provisions state you must follow a healthy diet and exercise. To expect a change in your body without changing your lifestyle is nearly irrational.

Over the counter products tend to evade heavy regulation. However this lack of regulation comes at the cost of potentially harmful side effects. The article continues to mention other over the counter weight loss supplements including: green tea, caffeine, hoodia and alli. The billion dollar question is: if any of these pills truly worked, why is the obesity epidemic getting worse? Stay tuned for an upcoming article on the newest supplement alli. No, it wasn't named after me.

The recent post about the death of the little girl in Wales from undiagnosed diabetes gave me a heavy heart. It also sparked a memory of the weeks leading up to my brother's type 1 diagnosis.

I actually profited from my brother's warning signs. In the six weeks or so leading up to his diagnosis, he was devoid of energy. He was also incredibly thirsty, trying to satiate a steadily rising blood sugar wracking his teenage body. I was only nine years old, but recall delivering gallons of ice cold water to him as he lethargically lay on the couch. For each gallon, he paid me $1.00. He proposed the deal out of desperate thirst. I only thought it an oddly-made fortune, and happily watched the rising stack of dollar bills.

As my brother's symptoms worsened, my mom's worry and frustration rose. A eureka moment arrived when she watched my brother drag his feet while playing ping-pong with my dad. Suddenly a thought popped in her head -- could it be diabetes? She called a doctor friend, only to have her notion dismissed. Stubbornly suspicious, she headed to a pharmacy to pick up a urine test strip to measure blood glucose ... this was back in the 1970s, remember those? The pharmacist steered her away from the test strips and recommended my brother get a blood test. Long story short, he was tested the next day. His blood sugar was off the charts. The lab had to dilute his blood three times to finally measure a 990 mg/dl blood sugar. After two weeks in the hospital, he was stabilized and sent home on a new regimen for life.

This article in WebMD clearly outlines the warning signs of type 1 diabetes. Early symptoms include frequent urination, extreme thirst, weight loss,and increased hunger (not always) over a few days or weeks. Rapidly rising blood sugar can also result in ketoacidosis, a deadly condition characterized by flushed/hot/dry skin; loss of appetite/abdominal pain/vomiting; strong, fruity breath; rapid, deep breathing; and possible coma.

Spread the word, we need more awareness on early warning signs of type 1 diabetes.