With special guests:
- Helen Edwards
- David Gillespie
Our show today is dedicated to National Diabetes Awareness Week and its theme Let’s Prevent Diabetes. Type II Diabetes accounts for about 85% of all cases of Diabetes and is the focus of the week. The overall rates of Type II Diabetes in the Australian population have led to it being described as an epidemic by Diabetes Australia and the rate in Indigenous population is seven to eight times higher than in other segments of society. And it affects men much more than it does pre-menopausal women which may be due to the effect of the female hormone oestrogen.
In Australia the number of people with Diabetes II has increased from just over 200,000 in 1981 to over 1.2million in 2005 and the curve is getting steeper. With Type II Diabetes set to become the leading burden of disease in Australia by 2017 it is time for governments in Australia to make diabetes prevention a priority.
Helen Edwards
Our first guest today is Helen Edwards, a Social Worker, Mental Health Worker and Diabetes Educator. Helen can speak first hand about the disease of diabetes having being diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes in 1979 when she was still a child.
Helen founded Diabetes Counselling Online after seeking support for herself and finding there was precious little available for people with this condition. Helen tells us that people with Diabetes suffer twice the rate of depression and other mental health issues so this lack of services was exacerbating an already fraught situation. Now Diabetes Counselling Online has celebrated its 10th birthday.
There are now projects that target men and farming families with free online counselling, online forums and chat rooms to ease the isolation of men finding themselves in this situation. One of the best is the “Men with Diabetes Shed” in which she has tailored the very successful Men’s Shed movement to provide support where it is needed most.
Hear from an expert what should influence you to get a medical check for diabetes. If you are diagnosed with this increasingly common condition Helen provides a wonderful example of how to live your life fully and avoid the trap of depression and other forms of mental illness as a consequence.
David Gillespie
Our next guest today is David Gillespie who has recently released his third book titled Big Fat Lies: How the diet industry is making you sick, fat and poor. In his previous book called The Sweet Poison Quit Plan David described the incoming tide of Type II Diabetes as follows:
In 1965 Type II Diabetes was not recognised as a disease in its own right. This has changed to being one of the major causes of premature death in most countries. In virtually every developed society Type II Diabetes is the leading cause of blindness, kidney failure and lower limb amputation (3000 diabetes related amputations were performed in Australia in 2008) and is a significant risk factor for death from heart disease. There are predictions that the disease will wipe out whole races of Indigenous peoples in the Pacific within 100 years.
David has responded to this giant threat by deciphering the biochemistry jargon and the advertising buff to confirm in a very readable and entertaining way what many of us suspected, namely that if sugar is so bad for teeth it cannot be doing much good for the rest of you.
The surprising aspect of David’s investigations is that sugar is so insidious and ubiquitous. So much of what we see in the supermarket has high levels of sugar including fruit juice which is usually labelled as a “health drink”.
David links sugar not just with obesity but importantly with Type II Diabetes. If hearing David leads you to investigate his books and change your lifestyle accordingly it could be the most important 25 minutes of your life.
Song selections by our guests:
Helen Edwards: 100 Years by Five for Fighting from the album The Battle for Everything
David Gillespie: Sweet About Me by Gabriella Cilmi
The sound file for the show will be up on our website next week. In the meantime you can catch the interviews on our station 89.3FM 2GLF’s On Demand system here.