Jim Carlock wrote:
I am a diabetic. It wasn't the turkey nor the stuffing that did
that though. It was drinking a Coca Cola one day, during
a momentary weakness that brought about the ill effects.
;-) If I had continued on drinking ONLY water in my life
at that point and eating ONLY vegetables... who knows...
I drank one Coke and it raised my blood sugar enough,
where I became extremely thirsty and once that started... I
it became an endless circle of raising my blood sugar... that
went on for weeks until I lost 20 pounds and my eye
sight started going funny and I decided it was time to visit
a doctor. :-)

When type II diabetes is suspected, and the patient doesn't walk into
the office with an already abnormally elevated blood glucose level, or
an elevated HA1C, the method of testing is to have the patient drink a
highly concentrated glucose solution, and observe changes in the blood
sugar levels. Drinking the test solution doesn't give someone diabetes.
It is merely a test.

Drinking a Coke, and then falling into a cycle where your thirst
increases, and you continue to drink more sugar-infused beverages is the
same thing, just less controlled. And because it goes on for a longer
period of time, may result in other symptoms beyond the thirst. The Coke
didn't cause diabetes anymore than the test solution causes it. A
non-diabetic could chug Coke day in, day out and not become diabetic
because of it. (Of course a normal person wouldn't desire that much
Coke, either.)

My diabetes was first diagnosed one summer. One very hot summer during
which I thought my thirst was caused by my excessive sweating. Or at
least I did until I actually realized how much of the liquid was leaving
in a way other than sweating. By that time I was drinking about 3/4
gallon of soft drinks, along with a good 1/2 gallon of fruit juices a
day. Add in food, and my diet was about 7000 calories a day, but I lost
20 pounds that summer. But what I ate and drank didn't cause the
diabetes.

After I went through a rough couple of weeks weaning off of so much
sugar (and caffeine) a day, I was able to "control" my diabetes on a
normal diet, with no additional exercise. Of course as I got older,
lazier, fatter, and tempted by high carb foods more often, that wasn't
so any more. But none of those things *caused* my diabetes. I would have
been, and was a diabetic all along.

It was an old wives tale that too much sugar caused diabetes. Too much
sugar makes the diabetes symptomatic if it's already there. It doesn't
have that effect if there is no diabetes. The old wives tale was more
faulty logic. Coloration was mistaken for causation.

But maybe you'd rather be safe than sorry... or smart, and continue to
think that Coke caused your diabetes.

--
Warren H.

==========
Disclaimer: My views reflect those of myself, and not my
employer, my friends, nor (as she often tells me) my wife.
Any resemblance to the views of anybody living or dead is
coincidental. No animals were hurt in the writing of this
response -- unless you count my dog who desperately wants
to go outside now.
See My Christmas Lights:
http://www.holzemville.com/xmas2004/

"Warren" wrote:
It was an old wives tale that too much sugar caused diabetes.
The old wives tale was more faulty logic.

Nawh, I don't think Coke caused it. I probably could
have not known I had diabetes for a while longer if I
didn't drink that one Coke though. It was that one Coke
that raised my blood sugar so high that my thirst became
insatiable. I just use it as an old wives tale now. eg

Diabetes, in my case, was triggered by something. From
what I've read about it, it's an over-reactive autoimmune
response where white blood cells or some such attack the
insulin producing cells. Your body never stops making
those cells, it's just a very highly responsive defensive
system that kills them. That's the way I interpret it. I don't
really know for sure though.

And the way my immune system used to work, people
would get the flue for a week or two at a time, it would
knock me out for one day and I'd be happy go lucky the
next day. And for some strange reason I have some odd
control over creating heat inside my body. I just have to
think my ears are warm, and they get warm. I focus upon
my feet and they will get warm too. I don't know what that
really means, but I know I used to do it alot when I was
kid up in Illinois.

As far as type II diabetes, I don't know much about it,
but I've got a feeling that it can be fixed. I'm thinking
along these lines...

The body requires certain vitamins and minerals and as
you age, some things slow down and don't quite work
as well. This happens in pigs, cows, horses and humans.
And most of these thoughts came from reading stuff that
a pig farmer wrote about how to fix many things in his
pigs as they aged. It all made sense and it does make
sense. You just need to find out what is slowing down,
what is not being produced, what can be done to induce
production, etc.

For instance, just taking calcium isn't going to make your
bones any stronger. Calcium needs at least two other things
to make it work. It needs Vitamin D and it needs magnesium.
No matter where you go or what you read, you almost always
see magnesium and calcium together.

One site I visited indicated that potatoes have twice as much
potassium as bananas. That kind of took me by surprise.

Well here's a useful link I think about cucumbers:
http://www.botanical-online.com/pepinosangles.htm

I lost all of my links recently... bummer. Had a ton of great
links. :-)

Maybe doing a search for such things as "induce pancreatic"
g Man there's a ton of stuff out there...
http://www.diabetesforum.net/eng_comp_insulinresist.htm

And I left out stuff in the previous comments about alot of
other things... because I really didn't want to come out and
say I had diabetes, but I thought I'd get a kick out of it if I
acted like one of those kids on television... I have diabetes.

LOL Oh well. It's not that funny to anyone else but me.

That article about insulin resistance goes along with what I
was saying about the body not using things the way it used
to use them... and if the doctors out there are selling drugs
to fix things up, that also goes along with what I'm saying.

I just don't know right at the moment about what helps
produce insulin and / or what helps in the useage of insulin.

I did read that "balsam pears?" helped with diabetes in some
manner. I lost the link to that article... you can find articles
about it by searching for

"balsam pear" diabetes

or

"bitter melon" diabetes

I had some growing outside and was researching the ideas, when
I went out and talked to the neighbor and she said, "Get rid of
those, they are sour." and she started pulling them up. LOL So
I helped her pull them up. Alot of places out there are selling
tablets made out of the stuff.

--
Jim Carlock
Post replies to newsgroup.

In article ,
paghat wrote:

Anyone with an allergy to poinsettias would also have an allergy to pencil
erasers. They would not have gotten this far in life not knowing they were
allergic to latex. And their allergy would have nothing whatsoever to do
with normal healthy reactions (rather non-reactions) to latex.


Pencil erasers and poinsettia sap are very different, and it is not
necessarily a latex allergy that causes the contact dermatitis (The
reverse is not true -- there are lots of people allergic to latex,
and few allergic to poinsettia sap). In fact, I know of no study
that has determined what compound is involved -- severe contact
dermatitis is so rare that it's a matter of case reports.

However, broad studies of poinsettia toxicity have been done,
and you are absolutely correct that the rate of bad reactions
verges on the idiosyncratic. For instance, see:

Krenzelok EP, Jacobsen TD, Aronis JM Poinsettia exposures have good
outcomes...just as we thought. Am J Emerg Med. 1996 Nov;14(7):671-4,

From the MEDLINE abstract:

The poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima) is a much-maligned plant
which is thought by the public and some health professionals to be
extremely toxic. Despite pronouncements by public health officials
to the contrary, the poinsettia continues to be recognized as a
poisonous plant. To determine if there was any validity to the
toxicity claims, 849,575 plant exposures reported to the American
Association of Poison Control Centers were electronically analyzed.
Poinsettia exposures accounted for 22,793 cases and formed the
subset that was analyzed to critically evaluate the morbidity and
mortality associated with poinsettia exposures. There were no
fatalities among all poinsettia exposures and 98.9% were accidental
in nature, with 93.3% involving children. The majority of exposed
patients (96.1%) were not treated in a health care facility and
92.4% did not develop any toxicity related to their exposure to the
poinsettia. Most patients do not require any type of therapy and
can be treated without referral to a health care facility.


It's a little like the old joke

"Doc, it hurts when I do this"
"Then stop doing it."

There is no medical reason to be afraid of poinsettias. If one is given
to contact dermatitis something, one will find out quickly and avoid it.

My wife is severely allergic to poison ivy; I am not senstive at all -- yet.
Guess who gets sent out every year to clear the paths in the woods around
our place. If and when I become sensitive to poison ivy/oak, I will become
paranoid about avoiding it. Until then, I won't pay much attention.


billo

What a bunch of bullshit all the way around
The dosage makes the poison- Paracelsus ( The father of toxicology)

With all due respect to Paracelsus, this is an oversimplification and
irrelevant here.

Poinsettia is a member of the Euphorbiaceae, most of which are
dangerously toxic; thus it is supposed among some that Poinsettia is
also toxic. But the toxic principles found in other Euphorbias are
distinctly absent from Poinsettia, and there is no evidence that
Poinsettia sap is anything worse than a mild, if annoying, irritant at
any exposure. There is only one published case of death attributed to
Poinsettia poisoning, and it is unsubstantiated.

--
Chris Green

In article .com,
wrote:
What a bunch of bullshit all the way around
The dosage makes the poison- Paracelsus ( The father of toxicology)


True and irrelevant. Noting the diffrence between ricin and water
is a useful task, even though both are toxic -- at different doses.

billo

In article .com,
wrote:

What a bunch of bullshit all the way around
The dosage makes the poison- Paracelsus ( The father of toxicology)

There is no such thing as a toxic "dose" of poinsettia latex, & that's the
scientific fact. So your silly-ass & archly-cliche quote applies to
poinsettias only if it applies to water & Taco Time burritos. If
"poisonous" is defined so broadly as to include drowning because the dose
of water was an ocean, or eating so many spicy burritos that one's stomach
bursts & your sphincter turns inside out. Thus too large a dose of
exercise is poisonous. Too large a dose of standing up is poisonous. Too
large a dose of wakefulness is poisonous. Only if "poisonous" & "dose" are
catch-all joke-words is any of this rational, & the fact remains that it
is physically impossible to injest enough poinsettia for it to magically
become what it is not, toxic.

A hunk of granite is not poisonous & having one's head bashed in with a
large rock does not cause death because of the rock's high-dose toxicity.

The quotation is of course a poor translation AND out context at that. A
truer-to-the-original version would be "All things are poison & nothing is
without poison. The right dose distinguishes a poison from a cure," as
Paraclesus was much more an alchemist than a physician in the modern
sense, I believed in alchimical magic. What he taught itself turns out to
have minimal application to science, but in the popular mistranslation
Paracelsus is caused to imply something other than he actuall said. The
idea that "NOTHING is inherently toxic but EVERYTHING can be toxic in
excess" is now well known to be profoundly false, & even Paracelsus knew
that a study of toxins was NOT a study of all things in excess, since his
real meaning was standard among alchemists & still promulgated by
homeopaths who believe infinitely small amounts of poisons have effects on
the body the exact opposite of their influence at large doses. This is
magical thinking, not physics, certainly not toxicology.

Unfortunatley the partially misunderstood & entirely outmoded theory IS
still used to justify dumping millions of small doses of massively toxic
substances into the environment every day, under the premise that low
doses of even the world's worst toxins are harmless in concentrated soups,
no matter how large the total amount, so long as no single toxin would be
harmful at the low dose that is permitted for each individual component of
the multitudes of toxins dumped.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com

Oh shit now they are dumping poinsettias into the enviornemt,

Christmas is allready weird enough everyboddy sitting around looking at
a dead tree eathing candy out of their socks.