World Diabetes Day points to often-ignored ailment

     The first reference to insulin in a Chicago newspaper was both late and maddeningly provincial.
     The Chicago Daily News debuted the name of the lifesaving hormone that regulates blood sugar on the Feb. 13, 1923, editorial pages, in this embarrassing piece of whimsy mentioning the city's king of electricity and rapid transit:
     "To quiet a tormenting doubt whether insulin, the new diabetes cure, was or was not named in honor of Samuel Insull, we asked a doctor about it. He tells us that insulin was named from the so-called island of the pancreas. What a delightfully-romantic ring there is to the islands of the pancreas! One might almost do a ballad about them: 'Twas off the pancreatic isles/I smoked my last cigar."
     The Daily News, perhaps significantly, was studded with advertising for quack diabetes remedies like Warner's Diabetes Cure, mineral baths in Texas promising relief, and Sulferlick Mineral Water for those who couldn't make the trip.

     Kellogg's Bran continually ran ads mimicking news articles, promoting itself as a "constipation corrective," pointing out that "90 percent of all illness can be traced to constipation! It is responsible for most cases of diabetes ..."
     The Chicago Tribune at least shared the reason that the Daily News was waxing poetic on the subject: Drs. Frederick Banting and John McLeod were in town to talk to the City Club about their 1921 discovery, which, in May 1923, the Daily News finally got around to explaining in detail.
     I mention all this because quackery is on the rise again and because Friday — Nov. 14 — is World Diabetes Day, the date chosen to coincide with Banting's birthday. In 1923, an estimated 1% of the American population had diabetes. Now, about 10% of adults do, with one-third prediabetic.
     Diabetes is divided in Type I and Type II. The latter — 90% of cases — is where a body can't use insulin produced by the pancreas to process sugar in the blood. It's caused mainly by obesity, with help from genetics, and can be controlled by lifestyle changes and drugs like Metformin. Type I, also known as juvenile diabetes since it often presents itself in children, is when the pancreas no longer makes insulin, and it must be injected.
      Regular readers know I contracted Type I a year ago — through some undetermined autoimmune disease. Diabetes is not bad, as far as chronic conditions go — no surgery, no radiation, you don't have to die early, necessarily, if you do what you're supposed to do. In my case, that means swallow four pills a day, inject long-acting insulin every night and short-acting insulin as needed, should I decide to, say, eat pizza or sushi or some other high-carbohydrate food.

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