Diabetes Management

Controlling diabetes requires strict attention to your diet. While there is no cure for this disease, proper control can help to prevent its complications such as eye disease or retinopathy, painful nerve disease or neuropathy and kidney disease or nephropathy.  Our Medical Nutrition Therapy Program for Diabetes Management can help patients whether they are on medications for their diabetes or not. In fact, studies, most recently The Look Ahead trial, have shown that lifestyle modification, which includes diet and exercise, can help patients decrease the number of diabetes medications that they use.

Recently, a new group of people at especially high risk for developing diabetes has been identified. They are called prediabetics. People with prediabetes have as much as fifty percent increased risk for developing diabetes. In other words, for every 100 persons with prediabetes 50 will develop diabetes in 5 years.

The good news is that in a landmark clinical trial, The Diabetes Prevention Trial, researchers have shown that lifestyle modification alone (proper diet and exercise) can prevent or delay the progression from prediabetes to diabetes. In this study, lifestyle modification alone was better than medicine in this regard.

People who are overweight or obese are at increased risk for diabetes and prediabetes.  Weight management can help with both of these conditions. The success of lifestyle modification in the two trials mentioned above was achieved mostly in people who had a five to ten percent weight loss.

At Global Health and Nutrition Consults, our Diabetes Management Program targets weight loss when appropriate and offers customized meal plans to help control diabetes.