Diabetes

RECENT POSTS

June 29, 2012 | 2:18 PM | By

New Phone-Based Program May Help Lower Diabetes Risk

By Alvin Tran

The study relied on health educators to help participants make healthy choices. (Jerry Bunkers/Flickr)

Get active. Eat Smart. Eat your colors. And eat breakfast.

These were the four themes guiding participants in “Live Well, Be Well,” a diabetes prevention program in the San Francisco Bay Area for underserved communities.

Live Well, Be Well was also a new study led by researchers at UCSF and implemented by the City of Berkeley’s Division of Public Health. 

The researchers recruited over 230 adults at risk for diabetes from Berkeley, Oakland, and Richmond. They were randomized, and half received a series of phone-based, lifestyle counseling sessions. The other half, the control group, was offered counseling after one year. 

Participants chose from the four themes to guide their sessions, says UCSF Associate Professor of Medicine and lead author of the study, Dr. Alka Kanaya, M.D.

“We wanted to basically see which [theme participants felt] most interested in and the one they felt were most feasible for them to make a change. We really did want to pound home the message about healthy diet, eating correct portion sizes, [and] making smart choices when you’re eating food.”

Trained health educators from Berkeley’s Division of Public Health guided these phone-based sessions and helped participants create goals for diet and exercise. After six months, the counseling sessions stopped. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Place Matters, Berkeley Public Health, Diabetes, UCSF
March 21, 2012 | 10:36 AM | By

Global Experts Meet in Oakland to Share Ideas on Children’s Health

Malaria, tuberculosis, HIV — these are the communicable diseases many people associate with death in the developing world. But increasingly diseases like diabetes, heart disease and conditions related to obesity have become the ticking “time bomb” that public health experts are desperately trying to prevent form exploding.

Healthier school lunches can help fight obesity and its related diseases. (Photo: USDAgov/Flickr)

The Public Health Institute (PHI) convened the first-ever conference focusing exclusively on children and non-communicable diseases this week in downtown Oakland. Experts from around the world gathered to exchange ideas about how to prevent diseases that were once thought to be illnesses of the developed world from spreading globally. It’s no coincidence that the conference is being held in Oakland. “Poverty is a root cause of a lot of the problems that bring diseases like this to the fore, and it’s something that we grapple with on a daily basis in Oakland,” explained Jeff Meer, PHI’s special advisor for global health. “If we can get a handle on how poverty relates to illness in Oakland, then we can understand it in Bujumbura and Kigali.”

The four most common non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are diabetes, cancer, chronic lung disease and chronic heart disease. “Most of us think of them as illnesses that strike in rich, highly developed countries; but the fact is that there is a tidal wave, an epidemic of non-communicable diseases that is striking populations all over the world, and striking, frankly with great ferocity in very poor places that have fewer resources than we do to deal with them,” Meer told me. A tidal wave indeed — two-thirds of deaths worldwide can be attributed to NCDs according to Meer. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Policy, Children's Health, Diabetes, Obesity, School Lunch
January 9, 2012 | 5:16 PM | By

Soda Tax: What Can a Penny Do?

(Rex Sorgatz: Flickr)

(Rex Sorgatz: Flickr)

We’ve seen it with tobacco. As taxes went up, use went down. Public health advocates have been salivating over the prospect of a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages to gain a similar foothold in the obesity epidemic and the myriad health problems excess weight causes. But hard evidence on the health effects of such a tax has been limited.

A new study in today’s Health Affairs, quantifies the impact quite nicely. A nationwide penny-per-ounce tax, the authors estimate, would reduce sugar-sweetened beverage consumption by 15 percent. They say that modest reduction will lead to modest weight loss, which in turn leads to modest reductions in diabetes. After the researchers crunched all the numbers, all those modest reductions would, over ten years, result in 26,000 lives saves (or avoiding “premature deaths” as researchers prefer to say).

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Policy, Diabetes, Obesity, Soda Tax