Hey, it's Wendy and it's Jess and you're listening to the Food Heaven podcast your online resource for delicious and nutritious living

Hey everyone, this is Wendy and today I'm here with Marga Rae who's sitting this one in for Jess

Marga Rae is my amazing coworker and she's also a certified diabetes educator

in a previous episode we spoke about pre-diabetes and a lot of you sent us questions and comments

just about how to manage diabetes when it's diagnosed and we just got tons of positive feedback

so we figured this would be a great episode to have. This is such a loaded topic so we're breaking

this podcast up into two parts. Today we're going to get into just an overview of what diabetes is.

We'll talk about risk factors, signs and symptoms to look out for, what tests you can do to confirm

a diagnosis, we'll also talk about what are the goals for your blood sugar and we'll also touch

a little bit on self-monitoring at home, how you can check your blood sugars at home and what

you should look out for. And then next month we'll get into complications related to diabetes,

how to cope if you're diagnosed with diabetes, medication use and lifestyle changes. So first

I'll start off by talking about what diabetes is for a lot of people that don't know they're not sure.

Diabetes is a group of diseases that result in high blood sugars, blood glucose. So Marga Rae,

can you touch on some of the different types of diabetes? Okay sure Wendy thank you so much for

having me here today. There are different types of diabetes. There are type there's type one,

type two gestational diabetes. We are also looking at a higher incidence now of what we call type 1.5.

So it's starting to get a little bit broader and broader when it comes to diabetes.

And the reason that we make such a big deal about diabetes is that it is a growing epidemic. We're

looking at more and more people developing diabetes. It used to be that if you asked a question in a

group in a room, how many people have diabetes you would get small raising of hands. But now if you

ask that question, you're probably going to hit statistics as high as one out of four people

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