If she was still with us, Sue Townsend would have celebrated her 75th birthday this week. Sue, the brilliant author of The Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole, referred to herself as the world’s worst diabetic. While balancing her hectic career schedule with the role as a mother of four, her blood sugar would often run…
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In 1940, with World War II raging in Europe, Jewish Eva Saxl fled her native Czechoslovakia together with her husband Victor. They arrived in Shanghai, China, where they started their life as newlyweds. After a year, Eva was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Insulin had been around for twenty years and there were ample stocks…
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Attention, flat earthers and aura readers! Here is the book for you. We’re obsessed with health – half of the science stories in the media are medical-based. They bombard us with sciencey-sounding claims. Only more often than not, these have nothing to do with science. The problem with internet journalism is that people are far…
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I have the flu. Or at least something similar that left me in bed with splitting headaches and fever for the past four days. I’m not sure how I managed, considering the lock-down where I don’t see anyone and my only social outings are trips to the supermarket. But then anything is possible. After two…
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There’s been a global rise in type 1 diabetes for the past decades, and we don’t know why. The increase is exponential at 3% per year worldwide. On a country-to-country basis, the incidence is higher in northern Europe and Canada than in South America and Asia. We find the highest rates in Finland followed by…
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There’s a very famous Time magazine cover with a plate of bacon and eggs forming a sad face. Inside the magazine, there’s an article called “Hold the Eggs and Butter.” It speaks about the evils of cholesterol. The year of the article is 1984. Everywhere we demonized animal fats as we made way for healthier…
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Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. For reasons unknown, your immune system launches an attack on the insulin-producing beta-cells of the pancreas. After the initial diagnosis, many diabetics still produce some insulin in what we call the honeymoon period. It’s diagnosed with a c-peptide test and works a bit like a speed boost in…
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For someone who writes a food-centric blog, my eating habits are pretty boring. I eat a lot of pork chops and salad. The reason? It makes it easier to manage diabetes. Well, that and I’m a lazy cook. I used to be a shift worker, so my eating and sleeping habits were all over the…
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I was mid-game when suddenly the track started fading in and out. That familiar tingling in my mouth. My position in the race went from first to eighth. One second I was in one place, and the next somewhere different without any idea of how I got from point a to b. I was jumping…
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Diet is related to brain size. While navigating the food aisle in the supermarket is simpler than surviving in nature, humans still spend a lot of brainpower on food selection. Omnivores, like rats and humans, have significantly larger brains than folivores. That is the herbivores that specialize in eating leaves, like pandas and koalas. Contrary…
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