Transcript

Diabetes: Fact vs. Fiction

Ronnie:
Just stop eating sugar.
Stop drinking soda.
Stop eating fatty food.
Grandma said that if you tried the raw food diet, it's going to cure your Diabetes.

Kerri:
The misconceptions make me crazy.
The misconception of society as a whole is that this is one very easy disease to manage that only comes as a result of lifestyle factors and all diabetics just must be lazy. That is completely unfair. No one asks for Diabetes. No one wants to be part of this club.

Ronnie:
As a Diabetic advocate, I find the stigmas surrounding the disease are very tough to break. Diabetes can affect each and every one of us.

Kerri:
And then there's the advice from people who don't mean to be probing and have no intentions of being malicious, but they just say these things that just make you crazy. You can't eat that, or maybe if you just ran around a little or maybe if you didn't eat sugar or maybe, maybe maybe-- there's a whole list of maybes. They don't understand the condition so they basically spew what they've learned from-- I don't know-- the media.

Scott:
Book Diabetes or science diabetes. Not real life Diabetes and there's a big difference there. I think just the misconceptions of what it takes to live with Diabetes-- whether it's type one or type two-- that stuff can be very hard for us to cope with because it can be a little frustrating. We can't expect people not living with Diabetes to really understand what it's like.

Kerri:
We can't have people thinking that just because a mouse is cured of Diabetes means we are no longer diabetic. I can't tell you how many times I've had a family member say, "Hey, I heard about the cure for mice." And I'm like, "Hey, I'm not a mouse."