As Oprah’s recent show demonstrated, understanding the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 is difficult. To understand why it is so horrifying for children and adolescences to develop Type 2 Diabetes, you must comprehend the difference.

For the record, Type 1 Diabetes or Juvenile Diabetes as it is commonly referred to is an autoimmune disease and is treated with insulin. Type 1 Diabetes cannot be prevented by changes in lifestyle or diet. There is NO cure for Type 1 Diabetes. Type 2 Diabetes is often called adult-onset Diabetes because historically it was diagnosed later in life and is often the result of poor diet and excess weight. Type 2 Diabetes can often be managed by making dramatic lifestyle changes including diet and exercise. In both cases, Diabetes can cause the same serious long-term health problems such as heart disease, kidney failure nerve damage, blindness and neuropathy to name the more serious complications associated with the disease.

As the parent of a Type 1 Diabetic, you may be wondering why I am committed to supporting the Let’s Move Campaign. To manage my daughter’s disease, she exercises nearly every day. Our family does not need the gentle push of a public education initiative or a more direct nudge through the Fist Lady’s bully pulpit to keep moving. My motivation to engage in this public awareness and advocacy effort is not a result of my direct self-interest. Michelle Obama’s leadership inspires me because I desperately want to help other families avoid a fate that my family could not avoid.

It makes me shudder to think about the lives of these young Type 2 Diabetics. Children who are my daughter’s age and are facing a lifetime full of health complications, doctor’s visits and battles with food. In every case, this life sentence was preventable. I am on board and ready to MOVE!

Grocery Shopping with Elle

by Craig Welch

I wonder how many families around the world shop for their food once a week? That’s the ritual for our family and I think for just about everyone else I know. This is likely an American phenomenon created by credit cards, suburban planning and our work-life “balance”. I think that most of the world buys their food daily, or at least many times per week from neighborhood grocery stores, butchers, fruit and vegetable stands and bakeries. In other places, I imagine that the food is fresh, in season, has little or no need for preservatives and can be carried home in one bag. Like it or not, my family practices the American style of shopping. I try to stop at Carl’s Meat Market to stock up on the Bell & Evan’s natural chicken tenders and at Golden Harvest because their fruits and veggies are better quality and I like to support the local guy. Mostly, our shopping is a $250.00 trip per week military industrial exercise requiring lists, bags full of bags, an SUV, a credit card and if all goes well, at least one of our four children.

This week it was Elle’s turn. These trips present an opportunity to talk with each child a little about where our food comes from – well lit refrigerated cases wrapped in plastic? How to make good consumer choices – Spider-man gummies for $7.24 per pound or Golden Delicious apples at $1.29 per pound? Ultimately, they are learning how to make healthy choices to best fuel our bodies.

Having Elle along makes me realize not only how hard it is to make healthy choices about food, but also how hard it is to figure out what items in the store are really food at all. It’s one thing to try to make good choices from our fridge or pantry, but entirely another thing to make choices from a 75,000 sq.ft. box store full of colorful bags, boxes and bottles of chemistry posing as food. Even in our mostly utilitarian local Market Basket, the splash of color, bright lights and piped in music could be mistaken for a carnival.

As Elle and I start out, we remind ourselves of the rule about “shopping the perimeter of the store”. If we stay true to this rule, we’d be in OK shape – walking from dairy to meat to fruits and veggies and then to the bakery. This is the 1/4 of the store where the actual food is, but I’ve still not found a way to avoid diving into the middle aisles.

So we start on the perimeter with the glistening refrigerated cases of dairy products. Dairy is a good choice for Elle with lots of calcium, good fat and protein and not a lot of carbs to worry about. We don’t need much here because we are fortunate enough to have a Milkman. Yes, a Milkman! Just like the old days, we have a little white truck that drops off milk, eggs and a few other must haves to get us through to the end of the week. I try to get all of our milk from the milkman because it’s the only place I can get local milk direct from a NH farm. More on that later. One thing we always stock up on are Stonyfield Super Smoothies not just because they are great, but also for those times when Elle goes low in the middle of the night. She’s become pretty good at drinking while sleeping, and when you poke a straw through the little foil cover under the cap, it’s almost spill proof.

Then we’re at the deli. The whole idea of cured meat has never made us fans of the deli, but through Type 1 eyes, we’ve found a new appreciation in the giant cases of “free” food – carb free that is. Elle likes having a couple of slices of pepperoni in her lunch or some baked ham, shaved thin. Not that it makes much of a difference with carbs but I’ve never realized how hard it is to get something as simple as baked ham.

“Could I get a half a pound of baked ham please?”
“Honey Baked Ham?”
“No just Baked Ham please”
“How about some Virginia Honey Baked.”
“Any plain Virginia Baked?”
“Nope, just Honey Baked”
“OK … I guess”

Then it’s on to the middle aisles and this is where the label reading begins. The cereal aisle is a modern wonder of the world. An 80-foot long, 7 foot high wall of processed goodness. Shouldn’t breakfast cereal be one of those things, like bread and yogurt, that shouldn’t be too hard to get right? Elle doesn’t eat a lot of cereal for breakfast, but it’s nice to have one kind on hand that she likes so we start picking through some choices and studying our breakfast. Wow! Is this stuff even food? It must be food because most of them have positive nutrition claims on the front of the box. Whole Grain Trix? Coco Puffs are apparently a good source of Calcium and other Vitamins. According to the front of these boxes, these cereals are full of fiber and other good things.

What am I missing? This is what I find on the nutrition information posted on the cereal boxes – sugar, corn syrup, hydrogenated whatever and enough chemicals and preservatives to keep each bite bright and crispy until the next Ice Age. The boxes look more like toys than food. We finally settle on some of your good old-fashioned Cheerios and some oatmeal.

On it goes through the middle aisles – choosing, reading, unchoosing, learning and talking as we go. Is a 26g granola bar good enough to be 1/2 of lunch? What’s high maltose corn syrup? What’s BHT and why is it used to preserve freshness, and more importantly, why are they calling it BHT instead of it’s real name? It must have a real name right? We end up at the very end of the middle aisles and feel like we’ve made some good choices and some good compromises.

The rest of the shopping is easy – picking up as many fruits and veggies as we can eat in a week without spoiling. We start in the organic section because we’ve made the commitment to buy organic whenever we can and suck up the extra $25 – $50 per week. As I’m bagging up my broccoli, I’m wondering why we don’t put it in a box with a cartoon character on it like the cereal. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll work on that?

Grocery shopping is like anything else where making good choices requires making the time and having the resources to make choices. With all of the choices we have, trying to do all of this in 45 minutes is nuts. It’s very hard to find the time and make the time to talk about food, to plan meals, to bring the kids, to shop slowly, and to read the ingredients.

While this is hard for us, it must be nearly impossible for millions of families with more challenging circumstances. This process would feel dramatically different if I didn’t have a choice but to bring all of my four kids together, if my time were stretched thin because I was juggling two or more jobs, or if I had a budget so tight that cost per calorie was the deciding factor. The fact is, healthy food can be really expensive. That is, if you don’t count the hundreds of thousands of dollars in health care costs that your kids and our country will incur later to manage their Type II diabetes. The cost of good food is a major factor at the root of our Type II diabetes epidemic.

I’m thankful that Elle is 10, and so has the ability to reason. She’s old enough to understand that we’re really trying to make good choices to keep our family healthy. When it does turn into a fight, I remind myself that this is not a fight between me and my child – it is a fight between us and the food industry. It’s not a fair fight when you think about all of the marketing power, science, and technology they have on their side. This is why we need to stick together and be armed with as much information as we can find and share.

Needless to say, I ultimately came to the obvious conclusion that anytime one has the opportunity to listen to the President of the United States outline a proposal for strengthening the economy there should be absolutely NO debate. In outlining his proposal to encourage the growth of small businesses in this country, I was relieved to learn more about the tax incentives he proposed. I was particularly intrigued by the idea of suspending the capital gains tax for funds invested in small businesses. Of course, as a student of political science and public policy, a Town Hall-style speech always leaves me thirsty for more details. However, I do appreciate the opportunity this format provides for American citizens to ask our President some hard and deeply personal questions on topics ranging from health care for families like ours living with chronic illness to how we are going to reduce the national deficit.

President Obama did briefly mention funding for the NIH and the need to advance medical research. Of course, I am always desperate to hear more emphasis on this particular issue. As Elle’s mother, I do not think I will ever be satisfied that enough attention is being directed to this particular issue. As an American, it is hard to imagine that some of this country’s best and brightest scientists, engineers and researchers are living abroad because greater access to resources for this type of research is available in places like the U.K. At the end of the day, I am grateful to be living in a place where protestors and supporters can come together to hear our President outline his vision for how to move our country forward.

To read the full transcript, click here.

The evening began with a buffet-style dinner for the Senators and their guests complete with the traditional fare of chicken pot pie. Apparently, this is a dish that Senators have been dining on for years prior to the State of the Union. Savoring the spirit of bipartisanship, we sat at a table with Senator John McCain and Cindy McCain, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Senator Evan Bayh and Susan Bayh.

Following my private tour of the Senate Chamber for a close up look at my Mom’s desk, it was time to head over to the House. Guests of the Senators were escorted to the Gallery past the Hazmat squad decked out in their space suits.

Perched above the House floor, I stood and watched as Speaker Pelosi announced the Senate, Supreme Court, First Lady and President into the chamber. As the President began to speak, I was in a position to see members from all three branches of government as they individually processed his words.

From a policy perspective, I was inspired by President Obama’s proposal to support small businesses. It is my hope that these measures will spark an Innovation Movement as described by Tom Friedman in the following NY Times Op Ed on January 24:

www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/opinion/24friedman.html?emc=eta1

My favorite moment, however, was listening to President Obama celebrate the First Lady’s commitment to tackling America’s childhood obesity epidemic. Despite the cynicism that pervades our media driven culture, I still believe in the capacity of our government to make change in the face of adversity. When I think about children who are handed a diabetes diagnosis that could have been prevented it makes me angry and profoundly sad. Our children are developing type 2 diabetes because they are obese. This is America and we need to do better for our children and we can do better.

The pundits will surely focus on why the Republicans stood and clapped during some parts of the speech, but not others. Commentators will infer and split hairs and question whether President Obama emphasized all the right points. Talking heads will ask whether he was justified in his criticism of the Supreme Court and show split screens of his remarks and the facial expressions of the Justices. I expected that getting to see those expressions firsthand would be the most compelling takeaway. It turns out that the most treasured souvenir from this experience is my renewed sense of possibility. I feel hopeful that Americans from both sides of the political aisle can come together and tackle our country’s most pressing problem. We must work together because this is OUR Union and OUR children are waiting.

The suffering that people are enduring in earthquake ravaged Haiti is unimaginable.  To avoid further death and destruction, it is imperative that the 300,000 Haitians living with diabetes have access to life saving medication.  I applaud the heroic efforts made by the International Diabetes Federation, Insulin for Life and the Haitian Foundation for Diabetes and Cardiovascular Diseases to get these supplies to people coping with astonishing devastation while managing this disease.

To help ensure that Haitian families are able to access diabetes supplies today, I am going to make a contribution to the IDF Diabetes Trust Fund:

http://www.idf.org/donate-idf-diabetes-trust-fund-haiti

I encourage you to join me in making a donation today to guarantee that families like mine who happen to be living in Haiti and are facing unprecedented destruction have one less thing to worry about tonight.