When Worlds Collide

An Enlightened Omnivore Health Journey: Pre-Diabetes

Photo by Jens Lelie

Most subscribers to my Substack know me for my food writing, or my now closed butcher shops Electric City Butcher and Graze and Gather Meats. Some know I also own a brewery, or that I had a stint as a non-profit executive. But most are unaware of my secret alternate persona. For more than 20 years, I’ve been a healthcare public relations professional. I’ve written hundreds of press releases, media trained high powered CEOs, and pitched global media outlets on medical mouthfuls like implantable cardioverter defibrillators, and sensor-augmented continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion pumps. 

For the most part, I keep that line of work on the periphery, because, well, it’s just not as fun. But recently, my enlightened omnivore and corporate communications alter egos crossed paths in a meaningful–and I believe now–life-saving way. 

For years, my communications consulting work has been in the field of diabetes. With hundreds of millions of sufferers and billion-dollar products, there is plenty of healthcare marketing business to be had. But, all along, diabetes has felt more like a family member, than a client.  

My earliest memories of diabetes were at my grandfather’s house. As a kid, I remember hearing him talk about his “sugars,” like they were an unruly younger brother. He was always saying things like, “there go my sugars again,” or “my sugars just aren’t cooperating today.”

Each morning, my grandfather would prick a finger, drop a bit of blood on a paper test strip, and then wait for it to change color to see if he was managing his blood glucose properly. I loved to watch this kitchen ritual, often ironically while consuming a sugar bomb breakfast cereal.

I’d always jump when he pushed the button on the little finger-pricking device, the click reminded me of a mouse trap springing. He never winced from the poke, and I’d get a little light headed when he showed me the bead of blood rising from the tip of his digit. We would both stare at the tiny test strip, waiting to see what color appeared. Green was good. Yellow meant caution. Red was bad. I was always so relieved when the green color came up most mornings.  

Fast forward to 2003, and my infant nephew was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at eight months old, the youngest patient ever at Boston General Hospital. Type 1 is very different from the check and see diabetes my grandfather had. Both diseases have to do with too much sugar in the blood, but type 1 is an autoimmune condition. My little nephew had gotten a fever, and his immature immune system had overreacted, destroying the insulin-producing cells in his pancreas. You need insulin to turn sugar in your bloodstream into food. Without it, you starve to death. What had felt like a game with my grandfather, suddenly gained immense gravity as I looked down at this tiny human struggling to keep going. My nephew would remain hospitalized for several more days, and would need to take insulin daily for the rest of his life to stay alive. The good news is that he’s now a very healthy and very normal twenty something, if Gen Z’s can be called normal.  

Diabetes continued to show up on my doorstep. A cousin was diagnosed with type 1 a few years later. And then another nephew, and a sister–in-law after pregnancy. Diabetes was lurking just around the corner.  

Then my parents were diagnosed with type 2. That’s the diabetes most people are familiar with. The type my grandfather had. The body can still make insulin, but it doesn’t work as well at taking the sugar out of the blood. I remembered Grandpa’s kitchen table. And for the first time, I saw how my parents were getting older. They were grandparents now, with all the perks and the challenges that grandparents have.

It felt like this cloud of diabetes was closing in around me like a dense fog. And I was becoming a bit of a hypochondriac. When my kids were babies, I bought a blood glucose meter and pricked their heels every time they had a cold, making sure the illness wasn’t destroying their pancreas. If they went to the bathroom more frequently, I’d prick a finger to take a test, because increased peeing was another sign of type 1. Every visit to the doctor, I held my breath when he revealed my average glucose test. I knew it was only a matter of time before the grandparent disease found me. 

So when the doctor told me this year that he had something to share from my labs, I assumed the worst. 

“I’ve got diabetes don’t I?”

“No, you’re fine. But….it’s becoming a…possibility,” he said. “If you don’t make some changes, you’ll be pre-diabetic soon.”

This wasn’t a death sentence. It wasn’t even a diagnosis. “You almost have pre-diabetes,” I said in my headI let those words sink in a bit. There was still time. I felt a bit like Ebenezer Scrooge, the ghost of diabetes yet to come had just shown me the shadows of my future. 

So what does a closet MedTech PR spin doctor/Enlightened Omnivore do when faced with a potential health crisis? He definitely overthink things a bit. Maybe a few late night Google research sessions with the laptop. A couple of pouting sessions too. And then he comes up with a plan that includes lots of conversations with smart people, a whole food diet overload, testing of some natural remedies, and a little technology that he can play with along the way. Oh, and then he plans to write about it.

So that’s what I’m doing.

For the last month, I’ve been talking to experts, altering my diet, increasing my physical activity, even eating some glucose-lowering mushrooms, all while monitoring my progress with a wizbang technology called Continuous Glucose Monitoring. More on that later.

In the coming weeks, you’ll hear from a world renowned endocrinologist–that’s a diabetes doctor, a health and wellness influencer, a nutritionist, and a man who harvests ancient fungus in the birch forests of Alaska. 

I’m no doctor, and I’m not suggesting my experience will change anyone else's life, but I hope it changes mine. And, I thought it might be fun to share a little of my medical misadventure so that we can all learn something new about this incredible machine called the human body.

Don’t worry, I’m not turning Enlightened Omnivore into some woowoo health supplement pyramid scheme. In fact, I’ll be sprinkling this series of articles—which I’m calling the Worlds Collide Series—in over the next several weeks. There will be plenty of other exciting posts that squarely fall into the food, sustainability, and France subject headings too. 

But as I embark on this little journey, I’m reminded that life has a funny way of merging our paths, whether we expect it to or not. It’s easy to compartmentalize parts of ourselves—to see one route as a profession, and the other as passion—but health has a way of cutting through all of that. I’m not here to preach or profess, but I hope that sharing my own self-experiment will encourage a dialogue about living more mindfully, especially when faced with potential health challenges. 

I’ll continue to explore the joys of food, the importance of sustainability, and now the latest adventures in health technology—because, in the end, these seemingly separate worlds are all part of who I am. 

I hope you’ll join me!

Remember, everything in moderation!