Change of URL for Blood Sugar 101 Website

 Due to Wix more than doubling the cost of hosting Bloodsugar101.com I have cancelled the subscription. The website is still completely intact and can be found at this web address. Please update your bookmarks!

lottadata.wixsite.com/bloodsugar101 

Subpage URLs still have the same text if you prefix them with a "/"after the "bloodsugar101" 

The website search currently does not work, but I am hoping it will be fixed when Google recrawls the site. 

Sorry about the inconvenience.  I just couldn't see paying what they were going to be charging me henceforth. The site gets very light traffic nowadays, thanks to Google's policy of favoring a few hospital websites for medical information so that my site no longer comes up on popular diabetes searches. 

The site has had an exceptional run over the 14 years it has been live and there are a lot more people out there helping other people with diabetes achieve healthy, normal blood sugars with diet and the safest drugs. So it's been a good run.

Special Considerations for People with COVID-19 Related Diabetes

Page Added: COVID-19 Related Diabetes

Added a new page for people who have been given a diabetes diagnosis shortly after having a COVID-19 infection. Pointed out that COVID-19 may damage the pancreas in a way that produces a Type 1, rather than a Type 2 Diabetes. Explains the importance of getting the correct diagnosis to avoid a potentially fatal case of diabetic ketoacidosis. 

Describes a possible approach to helping with high blood sugars caused by dexamethasone treatment. 

Metformin Lowers Mortality of Covid-19 in Women but Not Men

Page Changed:  https://www.bloodsugar101.com/metformin

​Text Added: 

Metformin was seen to decrease deaths among diabetic and obese women by 21-24% though not in men. The study analyzed a UnitedHealthcare database of 73,000 patients with COVID-19, but it focused on 6,000 who had obesity or diabetes.

This apparently is because the drug has a different effect on women's immune systems than on men's. In women's it apparently damps down inflammation.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.19.20135095v1

This newspaper report goes into more detail:

https://www.startribune.com/university-of-minnesota-s-large-covid-19-study-finds-new-drug-targets/571430922/https://www.bloodsugar101.com/metformin

New GWAS Study identifies Type 2 Diabetes Genes in East Asian Populations

Page Changed:

Text Added:  The Real Causes of Type 2 Diabetes

East Asian populations have some of the same diabetes genes as the ones described above, but a 2020 gene wide study identified yet another set of Type 2 diabetes genes found only in that population as well as variations that explain why diabetes is more prevalent in East Asians whose weight is closer to the normal range.

Cassandra N. Spracklen, et al. Identification of type 2 diabetes loci in 433,540 East Asian individuals. Nature, 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2263-3   https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2263-3

​

Explained in Science Daily: First-in-kind study reveals genetic markers of type 2 diabetes in East Asians

Added info about cannabis and hunger to the "Help for when you can't control your eating" Page

Page changed: https://www.bloodsugar101.com/how-to-stick-to-your-diet

Text added: Cannabis and  CBD can make you very hungry.  Now that cannabis is legal in many states we are hearing a lot of buzz about its medical benefits and especially those attributed to its CBD component. CBD does not get people high, but it has definite physiological effects, and one of them is to make people very hungry. This is helpful for people undergoing chemotherapy, who need to eat, but can be a problem for the rest of us.

Note that  many products sold outside of dispensaries claiming to contain CBD contain so little that they have no physiological effect. Hunger is only an issue with the higher CBD strains sold at dispensaries. That said, even cannabis strains without CBD can give people fearsome attacks of the munchies a few hours after they are consumed. The reason for this turns out not to be fluctuating blood sugars, as people used to believe, but because there are components in certain cannabis strains--particularly those with indica genetics--that stimulate cannabinoid receptors in the gut in ways that activate the brain's hunger center. 

The good news is that there are other THC-containing strains that do not provoke a hunger response. Some Sativa strains can actually  dampen hunger. If you live in a place where cannabis is legal, you will just have to experiment until you find a strain that doesn't sabotage your diet.

Pancreatitis after taking GLP-1 analog drugs linked to carrier status for hemochromatosis and cystic fibrosis

Page Changed Glp-1 Agonists

Text Added:

NEW! Pancreatitis after taking these drugs  is more likely to occur in people who are carriers of the Cystic Fibrosis or Hemochromatosis gene.  ​ Research published in 2018 suggests that people who are carriers or the genes for Cystic Fibrosis or Hemochromatosis may be at more risk for the pancreatitis caused by this family of drugs. Since these people are carriers, they are not diagnosed with these conditions, but if they have children with others who also carry these genes their children have a significant risk of inheriting these conditions.  It turns out that these genes, in carriers, may have subtle effects on the pancreas, which may explain why drugs that further irritate the pancreas may cause painful and possibly dangerous inflammation of the organ.

https://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/67/Supplement_1/2296-PUB

The Whole Blood Sugar 101 Site is Moving

UPDATE:  As of August 8, 2018 the move to the new host has been completed. 

After 13 years, the software that runs the Blood Sugar 101 site was showing its age, so I moved it to a new, much more easy to manage host. URLS with "bloodsugar101.com" now go directly to the new host, but the page URLS  ( for example: /912423325.php) will come up as "page not found" as the pages now have new identifiers. The redesigned menus should make it easier to find what you are looking for. 

If you click on any of the articles, which now display in a blog format, you will see a magnifiying glass search icon in the upper right hand corner which you can use to search the new site. There is also a google search you can find under "More" on the top menu. 

The old site at http://www.phlaunt.com/diabetes now redirects to the new website. 

This change will allow me to make the new site secure, which I hope will help it rise again in Google searches. Not having a secure site has become a problem as Google doesn't like such sites and Chrome will warn users away from them.