is a diabetic lecturer was that a good way of saying it lecturer consult consult anything about diabetes that's what i do so what you want to do is educate people who have been diagnosed or are being treated with diabetes exactly and also trying to help people that have a family history know what to do so they don't become that person that's that's critically important especially with the rise and diagnosis of diabetes that's occurring  such an increase so you have a masters of science correct and what is exactly as a master science master science is a graduate degree where i spent a couple of years learning a lot of biochemistry in my master science and clinical nutrition and  o as a dietary consultant as well yes and what other credentials that you have that give you the knowledge to help people with diabetes i'm a registered dietician by trade i started with that and went on to the masters of science and then eventually also became board certified as a diabetes educator which encompasses anything and everything about diabetes not just diet and everything is education absolutely knowledge is power and when you when you've made mistakes in your life or had things that happened because there's so many causes of diabetes and when you end up with that result how do you live your life and you want quality of life exactly that's pretty much where i come in is trying to help people figure out now that they have a diagnosis what do i do the practical aspects not just the medical of what diabetes is but also what do you do how do you live your life now so do you work with physicians i consult for physicians and i also do a lot of speaking engagements where i talk to groups of people try to help them understand diabetes it can be within the community it can be a group of diabetics with ink hump anees corporate wellness programs those types of things just really my whole mission has been to help everybody feel better with diabetes so generally people attend your lectures because they're trying to gain knowledge on how to improve the quality of their lives so what are some of the first steps that somebody can do when they've been diagnosed with diabetes well first up is don't panic your life is not ended don't think of all the horrible things that you can think of of diabetes the reality is that we can live a healthy life today with diabetes medicine those more than ever before so what you're saying is don't own the disease correct look at it as something that ok now i need to make some adjustments what are those adjustments how do i stay healthy with diabetes should be your question not oh my gosh what's going to happen to me so is that something the for the diabetic to do or the whole  family to do it really impacts the whole family i went into diabetes care because my parents were diagnosed within a few months which i when i was five i've lost my entire family all those near and dear to me due to diabetes so i've been the caregiver all of my life i've seen the results of twenty thirty years of diabetes ravaging someone's body so my whole mission is to help people understand you don't have to be there my family went through things because medicine didn't know as much as what we do today so today you can stay healthy but you have to learn about you have to understand what you need to do what changes you need to make in order to have that quality of life so what are some of the signs of people see and they live with the symptoms when they have diabetes typically when diabetes is coming on people get very thirsty though have they can't get enough to drink they just have a dry cotton mouth because if you're drinking a lot you're also you're an aging a lot so frequent urination goes along with that they may have a similar vision or changes in vision thinking they need to get glasses or the prescription needs to be changed but sometimes it's during the day it is and sometimes it's not so it comes and goes with that they may also be very tired they literally feel like they have no energy in their body and they're just very sleepy they can't get enough rest it's very hard to motivate yourself to do things is that because the blood sugars become higher so those are the symptoms that usually bring someone to the physician's office and you have a lot of people that complain about nerve pain or neuropathy yes oftentimes you get numbness or tingling in your hands or feet not everybody the good news is a lot of times that's reversible if these are all symptoms from high blood sugars most important thing is when you get the blood sugar levels down these symptoms go away they do not have to stay there the rest of your life do people cause their diabetes not so much because it we are two different as type one which has a little of a parent's component genetic component that's the person whose pancreas for whatever the reason and we still don't understand all the answers to this whatever the reason they're pancreas stops making insulin suddenly they can't make enough insulin just stay healthy and alive the type two is of the mass majority of people that do the opposite they make a lot of sense that it's acquired diabetes yes so this insulin is a big factor because what insulin does is it allows we all function for glucose our correct our brain does but we have to be sudden onset you can't live with a very long before you're at the physician's office or the heart actually because insulin is one of the required things for life actually and and usually that's what choir when they're young they usually start to use to be but i honestly i have eighty five year olds being diagnosed with it so went on three years of being undiagnosed and type two diabetes many times yes usually by the time we diagnose somebody we think it's probably been about seven to ten years where the blood sugar levels were taken some excursions maybe not consistently enough and they didn't have any real symptoms from it  took them to a physician's office to get diagnosed so when you look at diet yes what it what it what are some of the don't a lot about it but the biggest thing is we can work anything into the diet but the bottom line is this anything that contains carbohydrate breaks down to sugar now apple pie contains a lot of carbohydrate just like the apple does what a common sense should tell us the apple wants a lot of the pot a lot of the diet for davies is really more common sense than anything else if you're a lot of cakes and cookies and desserts a lot of processed prepackaged foods you're more likely to have higher blood sugar levels because the carbohydrate content the sources are so numerous in there that the carbohydrate contents high carbohydrate is what breaks down the sugar and carbohydrates in everything except meat and water and oil everything else is carbohydrate to some extent and one of the factors with eating raw apple as you have fiber so how does and glucose and in the production of insulin fiber it's very important what fiber does is it slows down the appearance of that sugar in the bloodstream and it also helps us feel fuller longer with that so it's a way of trying to keep the blood sugar levels after meals i'm going to high too fast and allowing the body to have time to remove that sugar as it's coming into the bloodstream so if you're eating a candy bar or a lollipop or something or a cake or a piece of pie or might my addiction ice cream which i'm proud to say i haven't touched for about nine months now good for you but you you observe that instantly in your bloodstream starts absorbed into your through that have a high fat content however the ice cream you mentioned i'm glad that you have given that up but it's a lot about never even a certain food ever again but it really is being more realistic with the diet and what you do the majority of time goes back to the eighty eighty percent of time the really good twenty percent of the time enjoy but small enough so i always say be on target five days a week and cheat a little bit on the weekends and achieving the one thing with the cheating i want some people to understand is that if you cheat too much you're going to feel it your blood sugar tells on you when you start to feel things like you mentioned it's hard and achy joints and so exactly as your body's overloaded all of a sudden exactly one of the odd things that people don't realize is when your blood sugar level is high you crave sweets and you start eating more and more and more sweets and it gets worse the craving gets worse your body doesn't get satisfied your i don't have food addictions by any means but i've always had this thing for ice cream and so my technique is i've learned never to keep ice cream in in the house so if i'm going to go for ice cream i'm going to have to make the effort to leave the house and drive there pay more for it exactly get less of it and then you know so it becomes it becomes more of an effort and not a convenience correct and that was that's high but one time i had gone without ice cream i bet six months eight months and then i went and had some and it was awful i think that's changed exactly and i thought how could i how could i ever want to meet this course i want to get in god and i want to get to god and then it was flavorful again and then an addict of and that's the thing with sugar is they are addictive many times they are and even if it's is in moderation a balanced diet and so forth but if i'm a diabetic how should i start my day the first thing is you want to have breakfast people don't realize when we don't eat for a number of hours we get sugar from two sources in our bloodstream the from the foods that we choose to eat and the second is our liver produces sugar from things we ate before that it's stored and uses that to keep blood sugar level stable over night if it didn't or between meals if you didn't do that you would wake up and you'd have no sugar in your bloodstream overnight because the influence constant being produced and constantly moving sugar twenty four seven so if someone doesn't eat breakfast the longer the gaps between meals actually delivers over produces sugar and blood sugar levels you can go higher instead of lower which is a complete conundrum for people as to why i don't eat in my blood sugar when what happened or they get up in the morning in their fasting blood sugar first thing in the morning is the highest number of the day they didn't eat they weren't sleepwalking and not eating over night they simply had their liver producing excess sugar you know strategies for that as well as for the diet so what should my purpose be breakfast should be a balanced breakfast you want to have some carbohydrate but you want to use something that's a longer source of carbohydrates so instead of getting like a pretty sweet and cereal or we always hear about oatmeal being very good for you but the thing with oatmeal is if it's a quick cooking a meal or it's the one minute cooking with the package flavored oatmeal now you've got a process product that's we've lost the fiber content and anything that we've taken and modified the nature produces changes the chemistry of water and not not putting a little bit of hot water real quick and getting it right now it's the longer takes to cook that means it has a higher fiber content the faster it takes to cook means that we've already processed that fiber broken down and pre digested for ourselves so when we eat that product we're no longer getting the fiber to the fiber we want to slow down that sugar the oats have a lot of help then them but they have to go in more slowly but we do it every day you can do it every day you can also choose to eat leftovers you can shift i'm not a big person it's got to be a certain type of food for certain time of day so if you prefer leftovers because you do not like practice type food that's fine if you like breakfast foods at five pm or dinnertime you can do that too so as a if i was a diabetic i would get up and maybe the pancake pancakes you can use but the problem is that sure depends on the type of pancake i should qualify that if it's a white flour pancake then now the white flowers have the fiber processed out of them that's what you'll hear about using one hundred percent whole wheat bread or whole grain bread but because a lot of the multi grain bread may not be that high in fiber they may have a very high percentage of white flour in them and why flour is wheat flour people forget that when it says whole wheat on the label that's telling you that they haven't taken the fiber content out of that food but it's the way it's about sugar level but slower and give your body chance to work with it and keep you fuller feeling full or longer so basically what you're saying is the more natural you can eat the more were the more that nature made the food yes is the healthier way for you to deal with whether you're a diabetic or not that exactly what i say to people mice my kind of way of saying this is straight from the tree straight from the animal straight from the ground that's what you start with now if you want to add herbs and spices and seasonings that's fine but don't let them already be added before you get it a label to that's going to be the process the salt a bunch of other chemicals things that we would never think to put in there absolutely well  sometimes it's hard to see where you're going but you have the power to change your problem all it takes is your life your  one or two or three big meals it really depends upon the person in the early stages in your first diagnose your pictures have a lot of ability to produce insulin so if people want to speak smaller meals because they're just they just don't have the time to sit down to a meal that can work very well but the longer you've had diabetes the liston from your pancreas is able to make over time it's a sad natural progression the disease and result is that for that person if they're not real careful about the carb intake at meals and limiting the carbs for snacks they can actually build their blood sugar levels higher at each time because the body doesn't time between to really remove all the sugar from what just came in so it depends on the person so we have breakfast and now we're at lunch so do we because it's noon or do we because your body is telling us to our body really needs when we have eaten it takes about five six hours to truly digest and absorb each meal if we go longer than that between meals we're more likely to come in very hungry we're also more likely to call on that liver to make extra sugar which  i mentioned earlier can actually work against us in type two diabetes have to do things in resistance the liver doesn't recognize how much sugar start in the bloodstream so it just keeps pumping out sugar and that becomes a problem for the type for that person it raises their blood sugar levels so it's little bit to wake up in the morning in the first thing you do is have a cup of coffee and it's so you don't even put cream and sugar in there just black coffee and then you wait for a while to have breakfast does the coffee increase your your blood sugar for many people will now i haven't seen one hundred percent with everyone i've worked with but some people are very sensitive to it just like anything else some of us are very sensitive some of us are not so what i usually suggest to some is if we could eliminate other possibilities and they're drinking coffee you know what let's switch to problem for people who drink a lot of coffee it may not have a big impact their body may be able to handle it for someone who is just drinking maybe two or three cups a day not by the pot for the day they may have more sensitivity to it it depends on the person so lunch time now carbs as a potato french fries really much for the potatoes in the french fry you want to look at the prom with a pinch point is that they have a high fat content and while that may slow down your blood sugar getting into sugar getting the bloodstream because the high fat content really doesn't help your body that fat is what also can tend to cause the cause the arteries forth and heart disease is a number one complication of diabetes so just because a donut may not appear quite as quickly as something else in your bloodstream doesn't mean it's healthy we still need to look at in the bloodstream we want to look at what else is coming with it and what's healthy and nourishing to the body along with the sugar and not the sugar and not just that with i've done some study on food combinations and so in nature you will find that in protein together yes you will find fat and carbs together yes but you don't find carbs and protein together and in any any great nomination exactly you are correct on that as far as the foods we like to typically tell people to have if you're talking about carbohydrate content it should come from vegetables at lunchtime it should be carbohydrate from a natural piece of fruit a piece of fresh fruit rather than being something that is processed package at that point to an apple because of the sweetness of the apple but when we eat that apple we're getting the minerals and i think often and i don't know what you think about this but often when somebody has a craving for sweets the body is the mineral the fish is very likely and they're craving really the minerals that are lacking exactly normally if someone has a high blood sugar they're creating cakes cookies pies the process food when you're craving a natural source of sugar like the fruit often times you're right there's a vitamin or mineral declination something within that fruit your body inherently knows it needs and then we get that as a craving and then we instead of eating a fruit we get twenty or something of that effect and we're actually we're creating this cycle where we're becoming more depleted as a result you know exactly so so dinner highly highly to the diabetic well if you think that it takes forty five hours for the body to digest it it's worth everything you want to make it at least five hours before you're going to go to bed so that can vary as people go to bed at two o'clock warning people not o'clock at night or seven o'clock at night on their work so when you look at that really if you want to give your body time to digest moves were your meal when we go to sleep our metabolism naturally slows down we can't burn those calories we can't use those calories at that time of night which is also why i suggest a lot of times make your main meal more the middle of the day meal when you have the ability to make your breakfast make your lunch and bigger make your dinner lighter that way if you're just going to sit and do the exercise of clicking at night and watching t v and then more likely to gain weight and possibly have higher blood sugar and then you're going up not digesting food overnight so it's kind of interesting we work on the city of rhythm that's all monitored by light  exactly so how how does a thyroid affect diabetes typically people who have diabetes oftentimes will have thyroid issues the thyroid and the pancreas are both anderton producing system part consistent so what that means is they make hormones both make hormones are part of the and consistent bottom line is that many people who have diabetes also have low functioning fiber what we call hypothyroidism they may or may not have real symptoms from it but they can gain weight more symptoms and what oftentimes will happen is the personal have both things going on when i have always it's like a domino effect if one thing is out of balance the body it knocks everything else down and out of balance so a healthy diet will help fight in that from that standpoint we also need to look at people when you have diabetes you have a high amount of insulin is a story charmer it means every calorie you take in your body is going to store as opposed to burning it and the purpose for that is your body utilizes what it needs at this moment correct but it tends to be in survival mode yes and so it'll take that energy if you're consuming too much of it and as you say put into storage where it is a storage sources that store is exactly where we do not like to have it where anywhere in our body but it can store it in the abdominal cavity can store it anywhere in the body but basically in diabetes we usually have we call that apple shape or our have a higher waist ratio thicker through the waist thicker upper body smaller maybe major filter of the body absolutely it's unable to do that then you start building up a toxin that starts exactly that don't you're not doing damage but even before it gets to damage you don't feel good and this is a process that oftentimes for people is so gradual that they just say oh i'm getting older getting tired because i'm older or oh i guess i just think of passes i mean we kind of try to slough it off as opposed to saying something's going on here now you're talking to someone who doesn't believe in age related diseases and old aches and pains wen those are signs and symptoms of something that's gone astray correct and when you correct that those symptoms and signs go away exactly and the worst thing someone can say to me is whoa you must be getting older they live but they're like y know it's about quality of life and you could be thirty or twenty five and have these problems and although your body recovers a little bit quicker but it's i think as we get older we do this damage and we absolutely if you just try to do something as simple as eliminate wheat from your diet it is amazing how much you go oh can't have that you have that and you don't think about how much these things have gotten into our food system and how much these simple ingredients that may not be as healthy for us can make a big difference when you choose not to eat them so hard it's absolutely so what diabetes is a big influence flamma to responsibility and we know that where there's inflammation there's disease and where the disease inflammation so how do we besides what you've already talked about and limiting certain things and so forth how do how do we treat the inflammation with the inflammation one of the big things is if you look at the different types of fat someone is eating we talk about the  your body it can go one of two routes if you take the make a three and make a six as it goes towards non inflammatory if you start using a lot of the saturated fats and you're take spice cookies you're types of foods that have a high fat content but not being the make it three  a response to try to get rid of the vater and then we have sort of like collateral damage you know but i think sadly so it's not about getting rid of all fats in the diet for many years if you remember when i first started practice in the late eighty's everything was the low fat no fat diet don't eat any fat  plus fat stores your energy your electricity your voltage and our body and without fat you don't have that storage with the fats that we need just like with the carbs we need some car we need some protein we need some fat but we need to be more choosy about what we're having with in those categories so if i was a diabetic what's the one thing i should reduce or eliminate the vast majority of people i meet that have diabetes drink tons of soda regular pop and soda and the first thing i tell them when i meet someone in their b levels are high i can't give them this little small amount of food need this small amount that they're not to listen to me but what i try to do is find out whether the top three foods that they're eating that's pretty emotional in the bloodstream and that might be get rid of the white products get rid of the sodas and let's start there and as difficult as that is that so we start so how do people get ahold of the tara i know we're going to your graphic but but do you consult on an individual basis or is it always with groups and lectures i do the groups and lectures now individual basis is really when i consult the physician's office so you need to be as a patient of that particular office but i do offer my services i go out and train personal care homes assisted living facilities nursing homes so the staff know how to deal with their diabetics as well as a good many groups that are interested that want to know more about diabetes or d prevention so they can just give me a call if you look at cancer and you look at heart disease and you look at diabetes where does diabetes fall on that scale depending upon what day here look it was it could be number one or number two it's in the top one it has become more and more prevalent when i first started pressing in diabetes my colleague said to me why are you doing that there's so little diabetics well now this is fast and growing unfortunately it grows because there are so many diabetics out there tell you there's a relationship between diabetes and cancer absolutely and so we see the increase in diabetics we see the increase of cancers we see we see all these things happening and it's all again lack of nutrition in proper injection that's where it starts and it's something that if you don't e stay healthy we need more people like you care to doing the job you're doing i want to thank care anthony so much for coming on and talking about diabetes and definitely it's a start to good health to control your diet and watch the carbs like you say carbs are necessary but they're not the mainstay so kara thank you so much for coming on healthy pets healthy owners thank you for having me the graphic will be up there please please contact if you're a small group or so forth and care i'm sure i'll be happy to get together and talk with you and help educat education is power and when you have that education that knowledge you can gain your health back thanks and cara thank you so much for watching healthy pets healthy owners will