#1552 Scribbling

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Three Generations, One Diagnosis — Laura’s Unspoken Legacy of Diabetes and the Son Who’s Breaking the Silence.

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DISCLAIMER: This text is the output of AI based transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors and should not be treated as an authoritative record. Nothing that you read here constitutes advice medical or otherwise. Always consult with a healthcare professional before making changes to a healthcare plan.

Scott Benner 0:00
Welcome back friends to another episode of The Juicebox Podcast.

Laura 0:13
Hey, Scott. This is Laura. Thanks for having me. I am your very first speaker that I emailed you yesterday, talking to you today, I've been listening to you for about six years. My son was diagnosed six years ago in middle school, and I would say I found your podcast within that first week. You are really who grounded me if

Scott Benner 0:41
this is your first time listening to the Juicebox Podcast and you'd like to hear more, download Apple podcast or Spotify, really, any audio app at all, look for the Juicebox Podcast and follow or subscribe. We put out new content every day that you'll enjoy. Want to learn more about your diabetes management, go to Juicebox podcast.com, up in the menu and look for bold beginnings, the diabetes Pro Tip series and much more. This podcast is full of collections and series of information that will help you to live better with insulin. Nothing you hear on the Juicebox Podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan. This episode of The Juicebox Podcast is sponsored by the twist a ID system powered by tide pool that features the twist loop algorithm, which you can target to a glucose level as low as 87 Learn more at twist.com/juicebox. That's twist with two eyes.com/juicebox. Get precision insulin delivery with a target range that you choose at twist.com/juicebox. That's t, w, i, i s, t.com/juicebox. Is t.com/juicebox this episode of The Juicebox Podcast is sponsored by Medtronic diabetes and their mini med 780 G system designed to help ease the burden of diabetes management. Imagine fewer worries about Miss boluses or miscalculated carbs thanks to meal detection technology and automatic correction doses, learn more and get started today at Medtronic diabetes.com/juicebox this episode of The Juicebox Podcast is sponsored by the contour next gen blood glucose meter. Learn more and get started today at contour. Next.com/juicebox

Laura 2:40
Hey, Scott, this is Laura. Thanks for having me. I am your very first speaker that I emailed you yesterday and I'm talking to you today. Yes, I've been listening to you for about six years. My son was diagnosed six years ago in middle school, and I would say, I found your podcast within that first week. You are really who grounded me? Are

Scott Benner 3:09
you gonna cry? This is wonderful. I love one listen in the first minute and a half. I'm great and you're crying. Perfect podcast. Keep going,

Laura 3:19
No, I think it's funny. I would say, I'm just trying to break the

Scott Benner 3:23
pension for you. Laura, that's

Laura 3:27
all, no, I know. No, it's really, you're like, almost, this is, like, the counseling session, you know, I don't think very many people that you know have a child diagnosed with diabetes. Always have, you know, an actual, like, real life support system, sure. So that that's kind of what you are for me,

Scott Benner 3:45
oh, oh, this is Oh, you're having, like, a real, genuine moment. Thank you for that. Oh, you're very welcome. Are you hearing me? Okay, I am, I am, are you hearing me? Okay, I am. I just there's a pause, and I don't know if it's because you're because you're upset, or if it's because something's not working. That's all. I just wanted to say, okay,

Laura 4:03
that, uh, it made a little bit of a glitch. Okay, so that was family. That was my emotional part from just my family life. My mom was diagnosed diabetes at 18 years old. She had a pretty rough go about it, go with it. And did pass away at 49 She lived her life without telling anyone she actually had diabetes. Your

Scott Benner 4:31
mom passed away when she was 49 she was diagnosed when she was 18. Ah, yes, wow. And that was how long ago? So

Laura 4:38
I'm 50 now. It was, she died in 9797

Scott Benner 4:44
Oh, I'm so sorry. When you jump on and you start introducing yourself and you get overwhelmed, like, is that because of the connection? Like, is it because we're talking Is it because you're thinking about your mom? What hit you? Right then?

Laura 4:57
I don't always talk about. Like, personal things in my life. So like, this is good. It's not something I don't really talk about it very much myself. Yeah.

Scott Benner 5:07
So in complete candid openness, I was looking at the amount of episodes that we have done, and I felt like I was like, we don't have as many as I like having on hand. And I kind of offhandedly texted Rob, and I was like, hey, you know we're doing all right, right. We have this many episodes. He goes, I wish we had 10 more. And I was like, Oh, me too. I was hoping he would tell me, No, you're fine. So I have all these days held to talk to Jenny and to Erica and to people like that, and we just don't have much of that going on right now. And so I said, Okay, well, let me fill in those dates with like, regular people. Now, most people listening would think, well, why don't you just contact the people who are already set up on the schedule and move them? And the answer is, that would be a lot of work. So I went online instead, and I was like, hey, who can who can record, you know, quickly, next Monday, two Mondays from now. And how about tomorrow? Because I had a person from Australia drop out, and it left today open, and you were like, I can do it tomorrow. And then I have never in my life had someone sign up, and then I recorded with them, 24 hours later. And I'm wondering if by not having time, like, are you more emotional? Because it's happening very quickly, I wonder, will we ever know? We'll

Laura 6:28
never know. Okay, all right, I see, and I would say my mom makes me more emotional than even my son or my dad. So as we continue on, my dad also ended up getting diagnosed. But he got diagnosed around 40 with type one. It's questionable. So he technically got diabetes, diagnosed with type two, but I would say, and probably because of your podcast, you know, within the last like several years, I was like, you know, you really do need to get your you really should be tested. Like, I really think you're type one, and he does have some, some of the antibodies, so I think he's probably 1.5 Yeah,

Scott Benner 7:10
very slow onset. Your mom had type one, and then your dad

Laura 7:14
got it. Yeah, it was a weird twist of fate. How

Scott Benner 7:18
many kids do you have? I have two How many brothers and sisters do you have one sister and your one child is the only type one. But are there other autoimmune things

Laura 7:29
on my husband's side of the family? There is

Scott Benner 7:33
so this was always

Laura 7:37
we thought we had great genes. Personally,

Scott Benner 7:42
those fools.

Laura 7:46
His sister has MS, and she actually has quite a few autoimmune issues. She has. She had Haji motos ms, and then possibly lupus, like she could be our own podcast, wow. And then, and then my mother in law also has, MS, no

Scott Benner 8:02
kidding, your mother in law, and your and your sister in law, they do, oh, gosh, that's a lot. Okay, so your mom has been gone for 30 years. Is that right? Just about, uh, yep. And so she died when you were 20,

Laura 8:15
uh, 22 my math might be a little off, but

Scott Benner 8:19
Laura, do you mind if we talk about that for a minute? Sure. Okay. I mean, what's that like, losing your mom when you're so young? Well, clearly,

Laura 8:27
very hard that 30 years later, it's still she was my everything. So it was, it was tough. She was an extremely positive person. But when, when she was diagnosed, you know, she grew up in a family that was very positive, and just never talked about difficult things. You know, everything is just great. So she was in college, I think she was a freshman in college, and then, you know, whatever her symptoms were, she went to the hospital. She stayed there for a week. They taught her, you know, how to treat herself, and then her family never talked about it again. It was kind of her burden to bear. What was she going to college for? I think just liberal arts. Okay, she was going for her Mrs. She was getting her Mrs.

Scott Benner 9:12
Degree. She's like, I'm gonna find it, yeah, I'm gonna find a handsome boy who also is gonna get type one diabetes, and we're gonna make a little stew for people, and one day, exactly, Laura's kid can deal with it. Exactly. There's a lot here, honestly, though, like, so, so your, your poor mom is diagnosed in college at a time when she needs help to begin with, and no one helps her. No one tell they just send her back to school. And they're like, Hey, you got this. And then we're just gonna smile like robots and hope this is okay

Laura 9:40
Pretty much, yeah, Catholic, yep. Sorry. Oh no. It's funny how they really are. There's stereotypes for a reason. Yeah,

Scott Benner 9:52
I was apologizing to the other Catholics. I figured you've made your peace with it already. Then did you have to do the same thing when she passed away? We used to. Supposed to just all put it in a box and just keep moving.

Laura 10:03
Um, I don't know if I was supposed to or I just did. Yeah,

Scott Benner 10:07
that's what I meant when I said supposed to. So, so you, you just, that's it. My mom's gone, by the way, at the same age that she got her terrible news. You got terrible news, yes, yeah, right. Like, So how old are your kids now?

Laura 10:21
So my 20 and 21 Do

Scott Benner 10:26
you have any weird feelings that the something odds about the befall them

Laura 10:30
more me? No, I don't feel like I'm gonna die, but it's I'm at that age now that I've lived longer than my mom lived. And that's a weird feeling.

Scott Benner 10:41
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Laura 13:00
It's, it is what it is, I guess, I mean, it's, we're reaching that age. I think you're similar ish in age, sure that there are, you know, I've, I've now known people are known of people that have passed away around this age. And you it's just amazing how much life, you know, my my dad is 78 and just how much more life she missed out on. Yeah,

Scott Benner 13:26
it really is upsetting. I have an acquaintances, parents, I'm trying to be very vague here. And the mom, just like, she just got a headache and died, you know what I mean? Like, and she was like, younger than me. Yeah, it's, it's really, yeah, just insane. It feels insane because, like you said, you feel like, Listen, 50 is older, but in a world where you can live to 80, no problem, it's not that bad, you know, like, so you're like, No, I have a lot more time. And then when it's just gone like that, as horrible as is the loss for your mom. Like, you know what she doesn't get to do? Like, it leaves you in a bad time in your life. Like, that's too young to lose a parent, I think, and not to deal with it too. Like, you've never gone to therapy. You've never talked to anybody about it. You talk to your husband about it, not really. Is he Catholic too. He is not overly religious, but, but he grew up the same way, is my point.

Laura 14:26
And you know, even I guess that goes on to when my son was diagnosed, he actually ended up quitting his job two months later, flat out. But nothing like he hit that wall of, I think he put on such a front of being the strong man that then he cracked. Oh, no

Scott Benner 14:47
kidding. Hey, listen, when you guys have sex, does it go like this? This is very enjoyable. Yes, indeed, it is. Does it go like that? Or

Laura 14:59
no, maybe a. The beginning

Scott Benner 15:05
happening. I want to watch that new Matt locker reboot with that lady. There's the thing no one under 50 even knows exists, but it's just a lot of repression. I mean, I don't mean that like you were probably like, Hey, I just went to jump on the podcast and tell you how great it was. How great.

Laura 15:23
I told you I wanted to just see where this takes you. Okay, all right, so feel free to ask questions.

Scott Benner 15:30
All right, cool. Thank you. I really appreciate you doing this. By the way.

Laura 15:33
I'm trying to be an open book. Well, listen, trying to get rid of all my repression

Scott Benner 15:38
here. Yeah, like, Yeah, let's just let it all go right here. Let it all out. You said he cracked. But like, did he hate his job? And then, like, this thing happened to your kid, and then he was just like, life's too short. Like, was it that thing, or did he just not was he unable to cope? I

Laura 15:53
don't really know. His job was very stressful. He worked. He worked long hours. You know, he'd gone through different managers, and his his manager was tougher, and he just couldn't get things accomplished at work. And, you know, it's, it's life, he probably would have kept going. And then one day he started crying in the bathroom, and it was like, something is not right here. Wow.

Scott Benner 16:15
How old was he then,

Laura 16:17
probably 40 ish, he'd worked at the same company for 25 years. It was his very first job out of college. Wow. But I was just, I think, I think it was about two months into my son's diagnosis, and I literally remember, you know, you just start catching your breath and being like, Okay, I got this. I, you know, Skip,

Scott Benner 16:37
he's crying in the bathroom, and you're like, Oh, good. The one I got is broken.

Laura 16:45
I literally remember driving and thinking, You know what? I'm blessed. We have, you know, my husband has a good job. We have good insurance. You know, things could be much worse. And then he came home and he's like, can we have a little conversation outside? You're like, great, you're gonna leave me god,

Scott Benner 17:02
he's been the girl up the street. Jesus Christ. Like, I bet you wished he was having sex with someone else when he started crying, right?

Laura 17:13
Yeah. I mean, he's always, like, the strong one. And clearly, I'm I am more emotional better. He asked permission. He didn't just like, say, I quit my job, but his permission was, I can either stay and be dead in like, five years or quit my job. Were

Scott Benner 17:30
you like, oh, well, we do have some life insurance on you, so I guess that's fine. I tell my wife all the time, like, you get back in there until you die, exactly.

Laura 17:39
So it all worked out. I mean, he he actually has a much better job now and is happier. He didn't

Scott Benner 17:45
start playing the bong like the bongos and smoking weed. He went looked for a different

Laura 17:49
job. He took the summer off. So, and we had, we had enough savings. We knew where, you know, how long we could go, yeah. But had to, you know, figure out the whole Cobra thing and, oh yeah, because

Scott Benner 18:01
your kid just had got diabetes exactly, you're like, you want to quit now. How about next summer? Kind

Laura 18:09
of, I mean, on a positive, we'd already had our out of pocket Max.

Scott Benner 18:16
There's a thing that people who live with diabetes, they just talk about every year like, it's the most like, oh, the out of pockets over this is wonderful. Seriously, like he takes you outside. You're like, Oh, God, he's gonna leave me. He's not gonna leave you. He's crying. He wants to leave his job. What's your first reaction? Are you worried about him? Are you worried about your family? What happens first? I'm so interested.

Laura 18:35
I would say I was worried about his health. Okay? For him to come to me with that was a lot, you know, yeah, you go through a lot of things while married, and I knew he needed it. He like he he would not be coming to me, asking that and showing weakness unless he really was in a dark place

Scott Benner 18:57
five seconds before the porch meeting. Can we call it that porch meeting? Maybe that's true. My God, your episode might be called porch meeting. Five seconds before that, could you have guessed this about him? No, not at all. What has that taught you, Laura, about holding your feelings inside? Not a goddamn thing.

Laura 19:19
I don't know. I mean, I think everyone has their own coping mechanisms, and I'm talking to you, so I'm letting my feelings out in

Scott Benner 19:29
my personal life. Maybe this is problematic too, like it probably is in some way, there's nothing bothering me that the people around me are not aware of. If I were to say something to my family right now that they had never heard before, they'd be shocked, and I don't have anything to say that. They don't know. There's a lot of silence. Are you processing that? Or did your headphones stop working? Today's episode is sponsored by Medtronic diabetes, who is making life with diabetes easier with the mini med 780 G system. The mini med 780 G. Three automated insulin delivery system anticipates, adjusts and corrects every five minutes. Real world results show people achieving up to 80% time and range with recommended settings, without increasing lows. But of course, Individual results may vary. The 780 G works around the clock, so you can focus on what matters. Have you heard about Medtronic extended infusion set? It's the first and only infusion set labeled for up to a seven day wear. This feature is repeatedly asked for, and Medtronic has delivered. 97% of people using the 780 G reported that they could manage their diabetes without major disruptions of sleep. They felt more free to eat what they wanted, and they felt less stress with fewer alarms and alerts. You can't beat that. Learn more about how you can spend less time and effort managing your diabetes by visiting Medtronic diabetes.com/juicebox,

Laura 20:56
processing. I mean, I think I'm a happy person. I don't, I don't think I'm a closed book. But I definitely probably am more reserved. And this sounds like after several years, you psychoanalyzed yourself. One, I think I do cry easy, clearly, and because of that, well, one, where my mom wasn't open, I almost overcompensated personality wise, that I wanted to be able to demonstrate to her I could handle everything. You know, I do take a lot on. You know, someone does have a problem. I want to be able to listen and be there, right? Because I felt that she didn't trust I don't even know what happened. I mean, quite honestly, my sister and I knew she had diabetes just because you think you can hide it, but you really can't. Yeah, yeah. And my sister, my mom and sister, got in a fight when my sister was in high school, and my mom was like, you you know you're lot, you know you're lying. You can't, you can't keep lying about all these things. And my sister was like, Well, you're a liar, like you lied about having, you know, not having diabetes. And that's, that's how it came out, you know, it was like in a fight, and, I mean, we knew. And so then it was the weird secret that she didn't know we knew.

Scott Benner 22:18
Wait, you're telling me that while your sister was in high school, how old were you?

Laura 22:25
We were two years apart, so I think I was in high school as well.

Scott Benner 22:28
Okay, so you're a handful of years from your away from your mom passing away, and she believes that the diabetes she's had for some 25 years at that point you're unaware of she believes you don't know

Laura 22:43
that's insane. Yeah. Oh, you

Scott Benner 22:47
Catholics. I'm so sorry for you. Oh, my God, what you must be going through. I'm not even kidding. Hey, listen, let me just say a couple things to you Catholics, right now, your vagina and your penis are fine. Don't, don't be embarrassed about them at all. Okay, that's the first thing, and then secondly, it's okay to, like, have a feeling, what do you count? Are you wait? Are you Irish? On top of all this? I am.

Laura 23:12
I mean, she did go through some hard times, so when she had a boyfriend, when she was diagnosed, and he ended up breaking up with her because of her diabetes. When she was married, when she married my dad, they moved to New York City, and I think she actually, I think she might have been like a social work, like some sociology or something like that. She had her first job lined up. They moved to New York City, and then she was just filling out the paperwork and check the box that she had diabetes or whatever, and they said they didn't realize she had that. And they, you know, different times they did, your dad, know when my dad, my dad, no, okay, but, uh, she, she lost her first job because of diabetes. Oh, so

Scott Benner 23:57
she lost a boyfriend, then a job, and then she's probably like, I'm not telling people about this anymore, but was the unconsidered circumstance of that, that by lying about it and hiding it so much, she wasn't taking care of it,

Laura 24:08
I think she believed she was in very good control, you know, even as she described it, you know, she was at the high side of normal. So I asked my dad relatively recently, you know, when she was happy with a a 1c, of eight. So she definitely kept it higher. Yeah,

Scott Benner 24:29
she thought she was doing well and but she passes at 49 of what, what was, what, what took her

Laura 24:35
pretty much every side effect you could have she did, yeah, but at day's end, she had a she had a wound on her foot that didn't heal, and then she actually had her leg amputated, but then she had her official cause of death was, I mean, she had sepsis, like had cellulitis. So, yeah,

Scott Benner 24:55
everything got her at once. It did. Yeah, I know what. Calling our episode, but I won't tell you till the end.

Laura 25:03
Okay, okay, I don't know. You might still change it. No, I got it.

Scott Benner 25:06
I know what I'm calling it. Don't you worry. All right, tell me a little bit about your child's diagnosis. So

Laura 25:11
with him, I did catch it early. I again, the Catholic, Irish Catholic. I didn't tell anyone. I suspected it, but I was just noticing he'd come home from school and we he never drank soda. But it was around Easter time, so we had, he would just go out and, like, down, like, a can of soda. And then I was just noticed that, you know, we were playing cards, and he got up, like, multiple times to go to the bathroom. It just well, within, like, a very short time period. So, and then, you know, I could hear him going to the bathroom in the night. He lost weight, but he also had a huge growth spurt. So he wasn't like, skin and bones. And my mom, I had no idea that it was there was a genetic component, okay, quite honestly. So, you know, it's like the odds, I'm kind of being ridiculous, like, there's no way he has diabetes.

Scott Benner 26:06
Oh, you thought somebody in my life's already had this. There's no way it's going to happen again. What are the odds? Yeah, they are. What are the odds it's already happened to one person and my mom, yeah?

Laura 26:16
And where I didn't think it was genetic,

Scott Benner 26:19
right? Yeah. Or just familial. I don't know how to talk about it, to be perfectly honest. Like, is it genetic? Is it familial? Is it like, do you know, autoimmune issues just kind of run in clusters? Like, your dad probably has lot of your mom had type one. Your husband's got stuff on his side of the family. You guys get together, or it's gonna happen. Like, is that? It's not great, exactly. Yeah.

Laura 26:41
So, um, you know, I went to the drug we still had the high, high deductible plan, and I'm like, I'm not going to take them just to get a test. Like, this is silly. And he had a, he did have a physical coming up. So then I went to CVS, and I was going to buy a test kit. And quite honestly, even with two parents with diabetes, it was like, I don't even know what I'm supposed to get. So that was a fail. And then, in the midst of all this, we were having our kitchen remodeled so we're I spent the night at my mother in laws while they while they did the floors, and I forgot she actually is type two, sort of, okay. I went to the bathroom and she had, like, you know, the test strips on the counter. And I was like, I can't deal with it. Like, if he does have diabetes, I can't deal with it right now.

Scott Benner 27:35
I love that you're getting your kitchen redone. That's the most Catholic thing you've said so far. Like, your husband's like, in a fetal position. You're hiding everything. Your mom didn't tell anybody about her diabetes, your bike, but look how nice the kitchen looks. Am I right? Yeah, that's the most Catholic thing you've said so far. Can I real quickly, I dated a girl when I was young who is very Catholic, and I certainly won't give out any of her details, because I'm sure she wouldn't want them out. But her family was a disaster. But the front of their house always looked awesome. They made very carefully sure that the front of the house and the lawn and how the cars were and everything that you could see from the street was great. And as you went into the house, there was yelling and turmoil. And then you got to the backyard, it looked like a junkyard. But as long as the people from the street thought it looked good, they were happy. It's really

Laura 28:29
interesting. Well, as a sidebar, I think one of this did not like trigger me, thinking diabetes, but as far as like cleanliness goes, I was noticing, like, in the bathroom, the toilet kept having like black in it. I was like, Jesus, I'm doing a terrible job cleaning the house. And I have heard after the fact that, like with the high blood sugar, yeah, you can get like, mold in your toilet. Like, it's actually somewhat not common, but not uncommon. No

Scott Benner 29:01
kidding. A week ago I had a young guy on from Australia, and now I said Australia twice today, and he talked about that about like, he's like, my my toilet was like a petri dish, and I couldn't figure out why. Yeah,

Laura 29:12
it was kind of disgusting. Yeah, oh, my God, I'm terrible. But anyway, so then my son did have a he had his physical and they're like, Oh, do you have any concerns? And I said, No, but I did, and then

Scott Benner 29:26
you went to a doctor's appointment thinking your kid had diabetes. He said, Is there any concerns? You're like, nothing that God can't take care of if we just ignore it enough.

Laura 29:34
Again, I didn't know how to bring it up. So then, like, as the physical was completely wrapped up. I was like, by the way, can you test his blood

Scott Benner 29:43
sugar? Were they like, Hey, what the hell I think so,

Laura 29:47
because I actually got charged for two doctor's appointments.

Scott Benner 29:51
They were like, you can, but you're paying twice, honey. They did. I was so mad.

Laura 29:57
So then the nurse came in. She tested his sugar. Her and, like, looked down and walked out, and I was like, so then the doctor came back and shipped us right to children's, yeah,

Scott Benner 30:11
the Boston thing just makes this story better. I just want you

Laura 30:15
to know, okay, Irish,

Scott Benner 30:16
Catholic Boston, yeah? Like, yeah. Just, I love that, that it's, by the way, you're gonna have one of those episodes where, like, the crazy things you say are gonna keep happening, but like that you didn't mention it at the top of the doctor's visit. Is really interesting. Yeah,

Laura 30:31
I don't, I didn't know how to, I mean, and my son, so again, if we're hiding things, I didn't tell anyone. I was concerned. So then I had to call my husband and be like, oh, yeah, we're going to children's right now. And I mean, my son was 14. I think he didn't know I was concerned. It was like, the most awkward drive

Scott Benner 30:55
down. Did the kid how old at that point was he? Think he was 14? Did he look at you afterwards and go, Hey, how come you didn't mention this? No, no, you taught him to shut up and keep his thoughts inside too. It

Laura 31:07
was a quiet down. He's high functioning autistic, so back in the day when there was Asperger's, that's what you would classify him with. Okay, so it was really hard, like I didn't know what he was feeling. You know, I give him, like, knowing diabetes, it's a life changing diagnosis. Yeah, can I

Scott Benner 31:31
ask a couple of weird questions? Sure, are you very thin, like, your body, stature? No, you're not,

Laura 31:37
like, I'm not fat, but I used to be thinner. Are

Scott Benner 31:40
you like nervous thin is what I'm asking. You know what I mean when I say nervous thin? No, but I wish I was Do you know you don't? You know

Laura 31:49
I did lose 20 pounds with his diagnosis, though? Well, I'm just

Scott Benner 31:53
gonna generalize here. People can just be mad later. I think we all know a lady who seems high strung and is very thin. No, do we all know

Laura 32:01
a person like that? Yeah, I wouldn't say that's me.

Scott Benner 32:05
That's not you, okay?

Laura 32:06
But I might be, I mean, it might be me, and I just don't see myself that way. It's possible.

Scott Benner 32:10
Okay? So, like, I'm gonna tell you, I didn't want to say it till later because I didn't want to impede you. But like, I'm going to tell you what I'm calling the episode. What do you think I'm going to call it? I don't know. I think I'm gonna call it scribbling, okay, because, because you can hear me, because I called you out on it, like, for noise reasons, you're not stopping, and I'm so I assumed that you didn't stop because this is your coping mechanism. It probably is, and I didn't want you to stop if that, if it was helping you. And at the same time, I gotta wonder what's happening inside of you that, like, being honest, like this is literally causing your hand to move like that. Like, do you know what I mean? Like, do you wonder about that? Or No,

Laura 32:56
no, that's just who I am. Are you

Scott Benner 32:59
nervous right now? Are you upset? Are you uncomfortable? Like, what's happening?

Laura 33:05
I'd say whenever I'm on the phone, I need to either be state, walking or scribbling, because it helps me process. Is

Scott Benner 33:15
it like? Is it a like? Is it like, a spectrum thing, or is it like, I don't know, like, I'm trying to figure out if it's you have so much pent up energy that it that you're vibrating inside. Maybe do people are people comfortable around you? I think so. Yeah, I hope so. I hope. No. I mean, like, do you make other people vibrate? No, no, okay. Do you notice when other people are like that? When they're like, I'm using the words high strung because I'm old. I don't really know what I mean, but, like, we all know what I mean, right? Like, somebody who's just like, never stops, never sits still is always busy working, like, bouncing off of walls for no real reason, like when you stand next to them, they make you feel nervous? Do you know a person like that?

Laura 34:02
I do. Okay, I wouldn't say that's who I am. I think just when I'm on the phone, for whatever reason, it's literally just a move, it is. Oh No,

Scott Benner 34:11
kidding. So you think of yourself as pretty chill. Otherwise, yeah, interesting. Would other people describe you that way?

Laura 34:19
I think so, yeah, but then my sister in law does think on the topic, needs to be in con and for certain things, I need to be in control.

Scott Benner 34:27
You need that like that, that illusion that you're running things, I

Laura 34:31
wouldn't say, running things I've described myself as. I need to have a plan. I don't need to be the one that makes the plan, but I need to know what's just like a plan is, is

Scott Benner 34:40
the vibrating person in your life, your husband, maybe,

Laura 34:44
maybe, probably, probably, gotcha. This

Scott Benner 34:47
is so much fun. I'm so glad I started a podcast. But can you imagine me right now in a sheet metal shop with all these thoughts in my head, like, how, like, crazed I must have been when I was doing this. I was like, talking to people, and they were probably like, why? Is he asking me these stupid questions that, like, I so interested in

Laura 35:03
people? No, no. People are reaching out to you, being like, I want to talk to you.

Scott Benner 35:08
Like, and at the end, some of them are like, Can I send you my co pay? And I'm like, Sure, I'll take it, but nobody ever sends it. I just want to point that out, because there's so much you can learn about somebody by just stopping and talking to them. You know, just really interesting, like, but, but again, like, I feel like you've now told five little stories whose moral is all you should tell people how you feel and what you're thinking, you know, I mean, like you took your your son is at that appointment you never mentioned to him, like, we want to check on a thing. Like your husband somehow was where he was, but five seconds before that, you had no idea. Like, does it make you wonder what you don't know about him right now?

Laura 35:48
Probably, yeah, but for the most part, he's, he's very like he's, he's very stable, and very much he works in operations. We decided, after my son was diagnosed, that he probably has Asperger's himself. Your husband most likely, okay,

Scott Benner 36:07
is that a thing you noticed about him when you were dating? No, because

Laura 36:11
my sister and I also think my dad, you know, once Asperger's didn't exist. You know, 50 years ago, my dad probably, you know, he wasn't the most emotional guy right growing up. So then I think my husband just seemed normal to me. Gotcha. Wow.

Scott Benner 36:30
Do you have any like Do you have any thoughts about you, what you want to talk about? Or do you want me to keep asking

Laura 36:37
questions? You can keep asking one at least somewhat funny thing to, you know, after so my son only spent one night in the hospital, which is terrifying, you know, yeah, yeah, you learn everything. And then they're like, Okay, you can go home now and then, maybe not yet. And then we're out, you know, our kitchen, it was a complete gut remodel. And then I'd say, we're like, I don't know, three weeks in, and then, you know, you've got your contractor guy that's there every morning, so he was the very first person I saw after diagnosis. Oh, so, you know, and it's just weird, because I was here every morning, and then I'm just not here. So he just, like, looked at me, and then I just started crying. Started crying. So

Scott Benner 37:26
like, Jesus, I just want to get paid. These people can't fall apart right now. I got a lot of money into this place.

Laura 37:34
It was just like, so weird though, because, I mean, it's like invasive, having someone in your house while you're going through, like, trauma, yeah,

Scott Benner 37:40
did you end up sharing a lot of it with the contractor because of that?

Laura 37:45
Yeah. I mean, I, I, I tried really hard to not be my mom. So, like, I'm like, um, this can't be a secret. This can't be something that is hidden. This is just how life is going to be. You know, this is your life.

Scott Benner 38:00
How successful were you in being more open?

Laura 38:05
I would say I was open, but then my son doesn't, he doesn't hide it. But I also felt it was his story to tell. Okay, so I, you know, in different situations. I'm not gonna, like, shout it out if that's not something he wants to discuss.

Scott Benner 38:26
Yeah, I could do an entire, like, series of ardent stories, of things my wife has said to other people that aren't it's like, why are we telling people that?

Laura 38:36
And it's, it's hard to be respect. You know? It's, yeah, need to be respectful. But then there's also a safety component,

Scott Benner 38:44
yeah, I figure that, I think everybody goes to that, right? Like, as the parent you're, you're like, Well, this is kind of my story. Like, you know what I mean? Like, my kid is having this experience. Like, I'd like to talk to somebody about this experience that I'm, I'm having through, you know, parenting my child with it, except the pre once the kid gets to a certain age, you're like, that's not your story. It's my story. And it's interesting, though, because both are true. And so what do you do? So as the parent, you're supposed to, like, dummy up and not say anything, right? Or get a friend that won't let anybody know that you've shared that thing with them,

Laura 39:19
exactly. And I think that's, you know, you're, I'd say, you know, Arden's a couple years older, which, following the podcast was kind of nice, because, other than the period, I kind of know what was coming in the next couple of years, you know. So, you know, college was a change, and a stay at home mom for the most part, and then diabetes really does become your life, and then all of a sudden, it's not

Scott Benner 39:49
Yeah, so he went away. How long ago?

Laura 39:53
He's a sophomore right now? Or no, okay?

Scott Benner 39:54
And is he managing to your expectation, like in a way that makes you. Comfortable, or do you feel on edge the whole time that he's away? A

Laura 40:03
little bit of both? He's not in as well of control as he would be if I was managing it. But I also know he I'm giving him grace, and it's something he has to live with and figure out. So he definitely runs higher than I'd like him to but as long as he doesn't, you know, die, I'm letting him go with you know, he always doses, he always corrects. It's just he does get high blood sugars that stay high longer than I'd like, yeah,

Scott Benner 40:36
how aware of your mom's situation is he probably not at all. You don't think he knows his grandmother had type one. I

Laura 40:47
think he knew that, but never gotten into

Scott Benner 40:50
that she passed from it, right? Really, any details? Do you think you'll ever tell him that I'm not hiding? I feel like I know it's like, I feel like I know the answer, but I'm just,

Laura 41:05
yeah, I thought, I mean, if you were to ask questions, I definitely would, but I don't think I'd. I mean, at this point, I think it would be kind of terrifying. I mean, she legitimately, she had Corrective Eye Surgery, but, like, had the broken blood vessels in her eyes. So went through periods she couldn't see her fingers actually, like started losing circulation and literally started falling off. At what age? Well, she died at 49 and I'd say the last couple years. And

Scott Benner 41:35
did she still think she was doing well while her fingers were tumbling off?

Laura 41:39
Or does she know at that point she wasn't the damage is done, you know?

Scott Benner 41:43
Yeah, but I'm saying, like, is this like, a five seconds before that happens? Thing was she would she have said, I'm doing great. Probably, yeah. Then I think the question has to be, and I feel weird because you and I are the same age, and I feel like I'm talking to you, like, Hey, let me explain something to you, which makes me feel weird, but you know, it's okay. Yes, it's my job, so I'm just gonna keep doing it. It's your podcast. Well, yeah, exactly so. And you're here willfully. Nobody made you. Nobody made you. Yeah, you look, yeah, that's, by the way, when some people are like, couldn't you tell they were uncomfortable? I'm like, they could have stopped at any point. Like, I didn't, like, I'm not holding any anywhere, not the point. I hope you see that what you said is correct. I think that if you just pulled him aside right now and you're like, hey, here's a story about grandma, and then you told him all that, it would be a lot, and probably too much for him. But I also think that if you don't tell him anything, and don't slowly open him up to that story, that one day when he finds out, and he will find out one day, he's gonna be pissed at you for not telling him. There's a balance you have to keep in there. You have to give it, you have to tell the story slowly over years. That makes sense.

Laura 42:54
Yeah? I mean, he knows he died of diabetes and complications, yeah. But

Scott Benner 42:59
you know what I mean? Like, the bigger picture, like, what I'm saying is, I don't think you want to be 70, when he's 40, and have him come to you and say, Hey, I really want to know about all this. And then when you tell him, he goes, Oh, I wish I would have known this sooner. You can't control which way it goes. No matter what you get. You want the opposite. That's about as human of a thing as I've ever seen in my life. So if you gave him all the information, he would say later, I wish she wouldn't have told me all that. It was overwhelming. And if you keep it all from him, he's going to say, I wish somebody would have told me that I could have used that information. So I think it's a game of like, disseminating it as appropriate over time, with the idea of getting it all out at a time where he's capable of handling it, which, in my mind, would be after he's 25 like, that's my thought. But also, you know him better than I do, but I feel like I'm saying this because you seem like you come from a family of people who don't share anything with each other.

Laura 44:03
That's fair. Well, he's coming home today for cop for Easter. I'll let him know. Hey, how about that bunny?

Scott Benner 44:12
Are you still Catholic, or are you recovering, as they say, a recovering Catholic,

Laura 44:16
non practicing Catholic.

Scott Benner 44:18
I say still a believer, but

Laura 44:22
not going to church. Was

Scott Benner 44:23
it the church part that got you, or was it the the parenting style that

Laura 44:28
got you? I would say laziness.

Scott Benner 44:33
Wait, wait, explain that, when

Laura 44:35
the kids were little, you know, and then they're crying going to church, you know. Okay, babies cry. It got too I mean, it's terrible to say, it was too hard, but

Scott Benner 44:45
it felt like a job, not a calling. Is that fair, right? Okay, how would you describe your dad's parenting after your mom passed, we were probably

Laura 44:53
dysfunctional for a while, so he got remarried very shortly after, shortly after, yeah. Was the

Scott Benner 45:02
handsome man. I like that. You're laughing, but you're about to say something horrible, and you're like, Oh, here's a good one. He

Laura 45:10
didn't tell us. He didn't

Scott Benner 45:13
tell you. They got married.

Laura 45:16
No, get the out of here. Now you might change the name. I have

Scott Benner 45:24
to tell you, I think I'm not recording enough. Recording once a day. I feel like I'm leaving a lot on the table. Wait a minute. Jesus Christ. Yeah, that was weird. How long had your mom been gone? I think

Laura 45:37
he got married within a year.

Scott Benner 45:39
Within a year, were they happy? Yes

Laura 45:43
and no. It got dysfunctional at the end. So my dad got diagnosed with diabetes, pretty close to where my mom started failing. And then I think there's part of him that blame. Blamed her for her. Oh, like she didn't do it. Yeah, okay. So then he got a type A trying to, like, control, like, control her and make her treat it different daily. It almost became a competition. Oh,

Scott Benner 46:16
awesome. So was he, gosh, you know, sometimes I don't know. Sometimes things pop in my head and I think don't say that. Well, you say that now, but was he just looking for someone to hold his penis, or was he like, ex like, is he lonely? Or was he like, Why do you think he got married, remarried so quickly? Sorry to say penis. Talking about your dad.

Laura 46:41
I apologize. You can say penis. So that was actually how he got diagnosed. To change the subject was he was driving, my mom and dad were maybe driving, like, on an hour trip, and he had to pee so bad that he actually made her hold his penis and while he peed in a cup, and then she's like, this is not normal. I

Scott Benner 47:05
am the best interviewer in the world. Seriously, you know those guys that people would, they say, like, Dan Rather, and all that bullshit.

Laura 47:12
Like, right? You say penis, like, a story. I got that story

Scott Benner 47:17
from you. Yeah, wow. So your mom and dad are driving down the road. He's got undiagnosed diabetes, probably lot of and he's peeing so much that your mom handles the thing, the thing handle, I don't know where to go. She handles everything while he's driving, so that they stop, so that, you know, it's nice. You call your dad's penis a unit. I think he'd like that and and so she because instead of pulling over constantly,

Laura 47:47
he they were on the like the highway, and he had to go so bad, I

Scott Benner 47:53
gotta say, I'm assuming the romance was gone by then. I

Laura 47:57
don't know she was holding it,

Scott Benner 48:00
Laura, that's your description of sex, not mine. Fair, wow, how about that? Well, that's the best story anyone's ever gonna tell. We can just close the podcast down now. It's over awesome, but no back to him, but back to him. Sneaky. Getting married. Like, how long was your dad married before you knew it? Remarried?

Laura 48:20
Like six months,

Scott Benner 48:23
so you would score your college. So I

Laura 48:25
was out of college at this point, living in Connecticut, and then my sister still lived, like in the hometown, but not your

Scott Benner 48:33
sister lived in a home in the town your dad lived in, but like going to school, but pretty locally, but not in the house. He was married for six months, and nobody knew it. And go ahead, whatever you're going to say I want to hear.

Laura 48:46
I think he was ashamed. And then I think he got bullied a little bit into getting married sooner than he wanted to. Okay.

Scott Benner 48:54
So he was ashamed, ultimatums, okay. He was ashamed to be in a relationship, and then a bossy Lady made him marry her. Kind of are they still married? They are? Is she still bossy? You don't like her at all. Do you?

Laura 49:13
You don't have to say,

Scott Benner 49:14
okay, all right, sorry. Sometimes I forget. Other people are going to hear

Laura 49:20
this. It's well, it's one of those, do you share that you did a podcast or just be like generic Laura, which probably after I said my mom was holding my dad's penis, I'll just,

Scott Benner 49:29
I want to be completely clear. You shouldn't tell anybody about this. No, I wouldn't tell your husband. I wouldn't. I literally not. This is the one time I'm going to tell you, I'd keep this to myself.

Laura 49:43
Shouldn't I tell my son? Thought that was your advice. You should start

Scott Benner 49:46
being honest tomorrow. Okay, not today. Yeah, you've been too you've been too honest. If you No, there's no way you should tell anybody about this. No, I'm thinking, I won't. You said your husband cry. Act like was 10 minutes into this. Okay, so I just need to know, where do you meet? Is it like a lady up the street who was like, Oh, look, who's free? Was it one of those things?

Laura 50:10
She is Korean and had like, a store, like a convenience store, okay, I don't know. I don't know what

Scott Benner 50:18
her being Korean has to do with this, but that's awesome. I really appreciate that you said that for some reason. Well, she wasn't Catholic. She, oh, you're just letting me know she wasn't Catholic. I see, I think Koreans can be Catholic. That's fair. Yeah, I think there's a whole episode of The West Wing about that, is there not? I don't know. I spent this a long time ago. Sorry. Okay. Wow, holy, not usually this tired before an hour,

Laura 50:49
I kept a lot in, man,

Scott Benner 50:50
wow, you let a lot out, too. You've been listening to the podcast for six years. Do you think I'm looking at your notes?

Laura 50:57
Yeah, so it's funny. I was going back so I don't listen to it as much as I used to. Oh, I'm

Scott Benner 51:04
sorry. Goodbye. No wait, what?

Laura 51:07
So basically, I would say listen to it up until my son went to college, because there's nothing I can really do to change him now, like he doesn't want my advice. Oh, I just feel like, if I listen and then get press, you know, want to tell him something, and he's just like, whatever, mom, yeah, almost like, would make me more frustrated. So I still listen periodically. Say, enjoy listening to but I would say at the beginning I started very close to when you were doing the series with Jenny. So it was just very informative in a very easy to digest way. And you didn't do as as many podcasts back then. So what I would do, I would have, I went a year back, so I would listen to all of your current ones, and then have like another, like, starting from a year until I caught up. Oh,

Scott Benner 52:04
I see. Okay. Am I making too much? Should I stop? No, okay, I can't stop. Now, by the way, this thing's a runaway train. I'm not in charge of that anymore. By the way it gets made, the way it gets made. Now, honestly, where the excitement comes from for me, like, literally, is, after talking to you today, I just want to go talk to somebody else. Like, I'd like to hang up, have a sandwich, come back and talk to somebody else like, I love, I genuinely love doing this. I'm starting to think about making other podcasts that I don't even think people are ever going to hear, like, I'll tell you a secret. I've already set one up. I found this person who's just really expert at a thing. And I told him, I'm like, I would like to sit and talk to you for hours, like, just hours and hours, and it's got nothing to do with diabetes, and I'll just put it out in a different podcast. I don't even care if anybody listens to it or not, like I just think it's interesting to find a person who's so expert at something. I don't want a bullet pointed like, the slide show about, like, here's the things I do. And like, I don't give a about any of that. Like, I want to know about how a person who's that good at something and that dedicated to it, how they think, like, about other things. Like, I think there's something to be learned in there. And I'm going to do the interview how for as many hours as it takes, and then I'm gonna put it together, and then I'm gonna go look for somebody else who's like, interesting like that, and have a conversation with them. I don't even care if anybody ever hears it like I think it'd just be great to do so the truth is, is that I could put out an episode every 12 hours, I think, if I really followed my heart on it, but I'm slowing myself down because I'm now putting episodes out like every day, like every and people are consuming them. So, you know, I don't know like, I just, I love talking to people like you were so interesting. Oh, thank

Laura 53:55
you. I think you have a good podcast voice. So if you do another one, I'll listen to you. It'll work

Scott Benner 54:00
out. Okay, it'll work out. You'll at least have one follower a topic. You don't give it, you don't care anything about just talking to the person. Maybe

Laura 54:07
you should just go on the streets and find someone and be like, Hey, want to talk. I

Scott Benner 54:12
think I could, by the way, like I, there's part of me that thinks I could show up at a diner and just like, keep putting people in a booth and talking to them. I think there's something really interesting about a lot of people, plus, look at all the stuff they hold inside.

Laura 54:27
Exactly No. I think everyone has a story. Yeah, tell

Scott Benner 54:31
me something crazy that you haven't told me yet. Like, think crazier is there a story? Does something pop into your head, even if you don't want to tell it to tell it to me, you don't have to tell it to me. But does it like, does something like, If I said, tell me something about yourself, you don't tell other people that, I would go, Oh, my god, is that true? Like, does something come into your head?

Laura 54:53
I can't think of anything interesting.

Scott Benner 54:54
You need the conversation to find it. Yeah, I do. Yeah. No, not just you. So I was kind of making a point, sorry.

Laura 55:01
Like, now think about it all day. People don't

Scott Benner 55:06
know what's interesting about them. I think that's it ends up being true over and over again. Like, I if you asked me about me, I don't know how to talk about me, which people are probably like, that's a lie. But like, if you got me away from this microphone and said, like, I think I did an interview the other day with a guy named Nick, and he's like, What do you do for fun? And I was like, I don't know. Man, I just make this podcast, like, this is fun. So when the tables were turned on me, and he just asked me, I didn't have an immediate answer. Now, he wasn't, you know, he wasn't trying or skilled at, like, getting it out of me. Like, so I'm sure somebody could get it out of me, but at the same time, I don't know if I could stop long. Stop long enough to answer their questions, but that's

Laura 55:44
what I think is interesting for you to do this podcast and another, you know, you've diabetes has been your life since Arden was two or four, and now she's in college. She's an adult, and she doesn't need you quite as much. And you know you're still giving so much to the community, but it almost is like you can take a step back. I think

Scott Benner 56:07
that I've taken my ability, or my skill, or whatever the hell this is, right, whatever, however, we got to all the things about your life. We got to in 58 minutes. And I will submit that we got to a lot, okay, like, so whatever. And part of that is because you trust me and because you've been listening for a long time. Like, and I and you feel you I'm putting words in your mouth, but you probably feel grateful to me in some way, right? I do. Yeah, right. So, like, so, you're open to me already. Like, so, but like, I'm almost interested, like, these skills that I've developed to have conversations for people with diabetes, like, would it transfer over to something like, when I can't ask about like, Hey, tell me about your diagnosis. I know this is going to sound crazy to people, maybe, but like, when I ask about your diagnosis, like, that's me being lazy and me realizing that you want to hear about people's diabetes. That's why you're here. But my inclination is not to talk about the diabetes as much like I think that part just comes out in a conversation. But I don't know if I'm I might be wrong. So I

Laura 57:09
agree to a point. I think everyone's story you know, whether you know it's your whoever, whoever is important to you that's diagnosed, whether it happened a week ago or it happened 30 years ago. It's, it was, it's such a traumatic part of life, of your life, and you can remember every single detail, like I remember, like watching, I mean, I can still go back to the hospital and remember that uncomfortable chair I slept in. I remember the person in the room we were sharing the room with. I remember, like, what was on the TV. So I think when doing a podcast, the details of the diagnosis are so bright and brilliant that you just remember them. And it's easy to talk about

Scott Benner 57:59
no and I, and don't get me wrong, like, I I want people to talk about that stuff. I kind of meant from like, a interviewing perspective, like, those are the ones I just ask, like, because I know people want the answers, but like, well, you

Laura 58:11
can't really ask, did your mom ever hold your dad's penis? Well, yeah, although that's gonna

Scott Benner 58:15
be the opening question. Now I'm gonna be like, instead of asking people there's other autoimmune in their family, I'd be like, have your parents ever driven and peed at the same time? That's my question. So the way I think of this is the conversation that you and I had today is about being a person, and yes, you're the mother of a child with type one, and you're the mother of a child who's, you know, on the spectrum. You're the daughter of a woman who hid her, her her diabetes. You're the daughter of a woman who died early because of it, of a of a father who probably has Lada. You know, you're a child of, you know, an upbringing that taught you to keep things private. And I think that if you're listening to this like you can't tell right now, but another person listening to this, like all those things go together, and then hopefully they see those things in their own life, and they think, oh, I should probably be more open about this, because it'll very likely lead to a healthier outcome for me or my kid like that. To me, is what we talked about today, but you have to be honest and open for it to come out. Because I could just say it. I could drag Erica on here every day, and I could say, hey, Erica, hey, we're going to tell people about how they need to be open so they'll be healthy at the end. And you know what everybody will do? They'll go like, this one, shut this. Like nobody wants to hear that. Like it might be true and it might be valuable, but nobody's going to sit for that. I was listening to my own podcast this morning because somebody told me to listen to one of them. They're like, You have to really listen back to this one. So I'm listening to it, and I jump in the shower and it ends, and another podcast comes on, not mine, somebody else's. And as they're like, talking it up, all I could think was, Oh, I gotta shut this off. I like. Oh, this is, this is painful, like the way and but they were setting up like, what I think would have been a really important conversation. I just didn't like the way they were doing it. And it wasn't holding my

Laura 1:00:10
attention. Is it their voice or their questions? A

Scott Benner 1:00:13
little bit of everything, their voice was a little not great the like, the boringness of the setup. I recognized the importance of what they were talking about, the way they were saying. I was like, Oh, do I really want to live through that conversation? Like, ew. And I even thought, like, I could use this information, but they're not going to present it in a way that's going to capture my attention. You got on this podcast and spoke honestly about about 50 things. That's why somebody's listening, and hopefully now, at the end, when they're getting ready to shut it off, they say to themselves, I should probably be more open and honest. I think it would be healthier, like, that's all I'm trying to do. But I don't know that I'm trying to do that when you jump on, because I don't know who you are, until we start talking.

Laura 1:00:55
Sure, yeah, listening to podcasts. If someone's not honest, their podcast is boring. I think everyone has, I don't wanna say secrets, but things that you know. The more you're open, the more of the flow of a conversation, and hopefully the more interesting podcast.

Scott Benner 1:01:12
I'm hoping to do that tomorrow, like I'm getting to interview a professional football player tomorrow that has type one, and I'm super excited about it, and I have a whole pathway that I think the conversation should go. But they also were like, you know, can you send him some of the questions ahead of time? Like, so he's like, ready? And I'm like, can we not? Like, I was like, can't, can I just talk to him the way I talked to Laura? Like, wouldn't it be great to find out if his mom was holding, like, his, you know, whatever, and he's not gonna let that out anyway. So, like, I want to be like, let me just pick at this and but so instead of just sending a bunch of benign, like questions to them, I said, this is how I just ended up sitting down and having the conversation in my head without him. And I said, this is how I hope for it to go, because I still think there's some I think there's something really important to learn from this person, and I think this is what it is. But you know what's gonna happen if I start digging in and that's not the truth, then it's gonna, it's gonna die right there, and then I'll have to, you'll know later, like, He'll either, like, be chill and go with it, or you'll hear me ask a bunch of the canned questions that I have, like, aside for him. Like, that's how you'll figure out how it went and, you know, but I'm really hopeful, because they say he's really great guy, and he's super open and everything. So I'm excited. Well, good, yeah. Anyway, all right, what have we not talked about that we should have?

Laura 1:02:32
Think that's probably it. Otherwise, we'd have to do

Scott Benner 1:02:36
a whole nother podcast. Are you in any way, shape or form, thinking of going to talk therapy. Now,

Laura 1:02:42
I think I just had my talk therapy. I think this will do it. I'm good. I

Scott Benner 1:02:46
don't think I'm a professional. If you feel better after this, but not good. Do you think you'd say to yourself, maybe I should find a therapist to talk to or do? Is that not a thing you would

Laura 1:02:56
do? I did it. I did go to one once, just one time. It's just not really I'm not against it. I feel day to day, good enough. Awesome.

Scott Benner 1:03:08
Wait, that's a great way to describe your life. Day to day. I feel good enough. Good enough. If you heard your All right, ready? If you heard your kid describe their life like that, what would your next thought be,

Laura 1:03:21
how can we make it better? Yeah, so, how can you make it

Scott Benner 1:03:26
better? We've said it 50 times, Laura, I need you to say it. I

Laura 1:03:30
need to talk more. Right, right? There you go. That's all. Just let it

Scott Benner 1:03:33
out more. Find somebody and if the people around you aren't the right people, then find somebody else you can you'll be happy you did it. Are you happy that you had this conversation? I am.

Laura 1:03:43
I think it's funny. After talking to you for or listening to you for so many years, it's just, you know, I know so much about you, obviously, well now you know more about me, but it's it's interesting. Why

Scott Benner 1:03:56
actually be on a podcast? Why is it interesting? Tell me just

Laura 1:04:00
because, again, I know, I feel like I know so much about you, you know, and every you know, all you share so much and are so open. It's just kind of neat to actually be able to talk to you, to

Scott Benner 1:04:11
be able to talk to me. Okay, all right. Am I open? Does that? Is that how I strike you as being really open? I think you are very open. Yeah, I think I am. But there's so much more I would say that if I didn't think, you know, we didn't live through the whole last couple of years where everybody's so like hell bent on, you know, not each other for saying how they feel about things. But it's going, I don't know if you notice, it's your other podcast. It's going away, though. I don't know if you notice that the zeitgeist is getting we're drifting back to the 70s again. I can't wait. I want to, I want to be podcasting still when it's okay again to just say how you feel, although you said a lady was Korean today for no reason, so I guess we're getting just like there was no reason to say that at

Laura 1:04:51
all. I would say I said it culturally. So she's, she's from Korea, so I. I mean, she speaks English, but

Scott Benner 1:05:03
Laura, stop, stop. I know you don't mean anything by it. Like, that's my point. I don't mean anything about it. I think it was just, I don't know I'm saying. I'm excited to get back to the point where somebody can just say something like that and it just, and people don't want to be offended by it. Do you see what I'm saying? Like, there are plenty of people who would make a comment about somebody's background and mean something by it. You clearly don't mean anything poor about it at all. I'm excited for a time where people just hear that and keep rolling and don't hear it and go, Oh, you know, we got on our hands here. This lady's a racist. Like, No, she's not. Like, stop it. You know what I mean? Like, like, that kind of thing. Like, I'm excited for that part, like, where we can, like, I really feel like we're back there again, like it's happening. So I'm super excited, but it's one of the most ill intended consequences of one of the political things that's happened that I'd never expected. Like, I didn't expect to be happy at all for the next couple of years, but I was like, Oh, this one thing is actually like, pleasant, like, oh, okay, oh, I guess I'll take that, see,

Laura 1:06:03
and you, you have to be more careful on the podcast, I can offend people, but you can't. I'm

Scott Benner 1:06:08
also not looking I shouldn't, yeah, well, there's no listen. There's no good reason to like, I don't. I wouldn't understand if you had a grocery store and you, you felt very strongly politically, one way or the other, I would have no understanding of you making that public. Like, are you trying to sell groceries to everybody, not just the people who agree with your whims about you know, I don't understand that idea like you're selling groceries. Like, go sell groceries to people you we don't need to hear about your opinion. And I'm trying to help people with their diabetes, not just people with diabetes who lean one way or the other so, and the truth is is I don't feel strongly in any direction, like I find myself thinking mostly like I hear things and I go, that makes sense. That's a common sense thing. And so is that. And I think that somebody would take the first thought and attribute it way right, and the other thought and attribute it way left. And I listen to both of them, and I think those things make a lot of sense to me. So yeah,

Laura 1:07:04
back in the day, I was, well, I still think I'm independent, but I have opinions. I

Scott Benner 1:07:10
honestly, for the first time, said to somebody, I was like, should I spend five minutes changing my affiliation to independent? Like, would that be a better representation of me? And then I was like, does it even matter? Like, I don't know. You know, it matters or not. It doesn't really matter. Yeah. Also, I come from a time where being moderate was a good thing, and then they people spent years telling you that that meant you didn't have an opinion. And I'm like, that's not true. So I don't know it's very strange. But anyway, I like where we're headed right now, in that, in this, in this one vein, I like that everybody's not running around, judging everybody every five seconds, because that was really tiresome and boring, and I did not enjoy it at all. So okay, well, here we go, Laura, you're awesome. We're calling this episode scribbling. Seriously, it was awesome. Like I I could not have had a better time with you. I appreciate you jumping on on such short notice.

Laura 1:08:06
Oh, good. I'm glad you replied. I'm glad I got to talk to you. You were the

Scott Benner 1:08:10
first person that said they were available, by the way, you weren't the only person who said they were available tomorrow. You were the first person. And I said, first come, first serve. And then there you are. So I genuinely appreciate it. All right. Hold on one second for me. Give me one second.

Thanks for tuning in today, and thanks to Medtronic diabetes for sponsoring this episode. We've been talking about Medtronic mini med 780 G system today, an automated insulin delivery system that helps make diabetes management easier day and night, whether it's their meal detection technology for the Medtronic extended infusion set, it all comes together to simplify life with diabetes. Go find out more at my link, Medtronic diabetes.com/juicebox you 90s, I'd like to thank the blood glucose meter that my daughter carries, the contour next gen blood glucose meter. Learn more and get started today at contour, next.com/juicebox and don't forget, you may be paying more through your insurance right now for the meter you have, then you would pay for the contour next gen in cash. There are links in the show notes of the audio app you're listening in right now, and links at Juicebox podcast.com to contour and all of the sponsors. The episode you just enjoyed was sponsored by the twist a ID system powered by tide pool. If you want a commercially available insulin pump with twist loop that offers unmatched personalization and precision or peace of mind. You want twist, twist.com/juicebox

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#1551 Smart Bites: Processed Foods and Their Impact

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Processed Foods and their Impact on Health

+ Click for EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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DISCLAIMER: This text is the output of AI based transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors and should not be treated as an authoritative record. Nothing that you read here constitutes advice medical or otherwise. Always consult with a healthcare professional before making changes to a healthcare plan.

Scott Benner 0:00
Hello friends and welcome back to another episode of The Juicebox Podcast.

Welcome to my nutrition series with Jenny Smith. Jenny and I are going to in very clear and easy to understand ways, walk you from basic through intermediate and into advanced nutritional ideas. We're going to tie it all together with type one diabetes. Talk about processed foods and how you can share these simple concepts with the people in your life, whether it's your children, other adults or even seniors, besides being the person you've heard on the bold beginnings and Pro Tip series and so much more. Jennifer Smith is a person living with type one diabetes for over 35 years. She actually holds a bachelor's degree in Human Nutrition and biology from the University of Wisconsin. She's a registered and licensed dietitian, a certified diabetes educator. She's a trainer on all kinds of pumps and CGM. She's my friend, and I think you're going to enjoy her thoughts on better eating. My diabetes Pro Tip series is about cutting through the clutter of diabetes management to give you the straightforward, practical insights that truly make a difference, this series is all about mastering the fundamentals, whether it's the basics of insulin dosing adjustments or everyday management strategies that will empower you to take control. I'm joined by Jenny Smith, who is a diabetes educator with over 35 years of personal experience, and we break down complex concepts into simple, actionable tips. The Diabetes Pro Tip series runs between Episode 1001 1025 in your podcast player, where you can listen to it at Juicebox podcast.com by going up into the menu, nothing you hear on the Juicebox Podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your healthcare plan. This episode is sponsored by the tandem mobi system, which is powered by tandems newest algorithm control iq plus technology. Tandem Moby has a predictive algorithm that helps prevent highs and lows, and is now available for ages two and up. Learn more and get started today at tandem diabetes.com/juicebox this episode of The Juicebox Podcast is sponsored by us med. Us med.com/juicebox, or call 888-721-1514, get your supplies the same way we do from us. Med, today's episode of The Juicebox Podcast is sponsored by the ever since 365 the one year where CGM, that's one insertion a year. That's it. And here's a little bonus for you. How about there's no limit on how many friends and family you can share your data with with the ever since now, app, no limits. Ever since Jenny, we are moving on to module three, processed foods and their impact on health. Woo hoo. Yay. I love the things you're excited by. I'm gonna open this up, and then I'm gonna let you pick through. It says processed foods can impact health in a variety of ways depending on the type of processing, the ingredients used and how frequently they're consumed. And then we're gonna talk about a number of different impacts and and factors here. So I'm gonna let you go through them also. By the way, I just said, it says, Here, it's notes that we put together. But it is exactly like something told us this. But go ahead. No,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 3:28
they're notes that we put together. Yeah, no. And I think this, this particular kind of topic, I like, where it lies in our flow, because of the way that we've kind of ended with different types of diets or plans for eating along with what happens to the food when you put it in your diet, where digestion goes, it kind of leads into processed food. In general, doesn't typically get digested, absorbed, the same way that foods that are just natural, like an apple versus apple pie from the grocery store full of whatever, yeah, right, or the packaged apple pie slice that's sitting on the shelf at the grocery store. And you're wondering, is the shelf stable, right?

Scott Benner 4:11
How come this doesn't expire for 17 years, right?

Jennifer Smith, CDE 4:14
Like, and another one that'd be kind of along the same lines, like Pop Tarts, right? Right? It's like, technically, fruit in the middle of those maybe, but you get the idea, right? So process versus real food, and I think one of the big ones is because we live, we live in a world today where food is so very available. And I use that term food very loosely, in terms of processed food, if we looked at our nutrient quality in terms of what we take in, we would likely find that a fair number of people actually have some nutrient deficiencies in their body, and oftentimes it comes because the processed foods, as I think we've talked about before, they kind of get stripped of what they started. What food they started out as, and so you'll end up seeing a lot of the boxed packaged foods on the shelves saying enriched, fortified, because they've taken out the stuff that was there to begin with that they grew with, stripped them down to this like white powder, so to speak. And now they have to add everything back in order to qualify it for some type of nutrient value. Yeah, I actually

Scott Benner 5:23
just did a little, a little dive while you were talking. So, oh, I asked our overlords, is there fruit in Pop Tarts? Oh, it says The short answer is kind of, but not really. Some flavors contain a small amount of fruit puree or concentrate, but it's minimal and heavily processed, and it gives examples the strawberries or dried apples or pear concentrate, and that's used to bulk up the fruit flavor. So this is actually from the packaging Kellogg says contains 2% or less of dried strawberries, dried pears or dried apples. So then the answer is, technically, yes, there is fruit in this. But it goes on to say it's processed to oblivion, heated, sweetened and stabilized. The amount is incredibly tiny, and mainly it's just there to flavor it or justify the name, correct, and it's mixed with corn syrup, sugar, artificial flavors and coloring. So if you're imagining a spoonful of mashed up fresh strawberries in there, I'm sorry, it says that ship has sailed. And then it goes on to be it picks a little bit through the marketing of it, and it says, Look, you know, why do they even bother putting fruit into it? It's because it sounds wholesome. It includes trace amounts. So it's allowed to be called Strawberry Pop Tarts, and the fruit, or fruit light taste does help cut the sweetness in all the sugar. So anyway, yes, that's it. And what

Jennifer Smith, CDE 6:51
do we as a good example? I mean, I'm sorry that we're like, hitting on Pop Tarts. Here it was, like one of those first things that came to mind worth talking about Apple. I

Scott Benner 6:58
guess I don't know why we have to apologize to them.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 7:02
You know, in terms of the comparison there, right? You know, their high calorie is one of the first things that I recognize with processed foods. Is an apple. A rough estimate is approximately 50 calories for your typical store bought medium sized Apple, 50 calories. I don't know even what a pop tart is. I'd have to look at the package, but it's probably like per single Pop Tart, even though they come to too little cellophane package is what like 150 calories, 180 calories. So again, not that I'm expecting people are saying, well, I'm eating an apple because I ate an apple Pop Tart, but as a comparison, from a food or a meal type of replacement, you could do better eating the apple with some nut butter or peanut butter. Maybe have similar caloric amount, but they're not empty calories. They're not calories that your body is going to not really recognize in terms of how it processes it on a cellular level, a digestive function level. Whereas the 150 200 calorie Pop Tart, it has very little nutritional value. There's just not there, I

Scott Benner 8:13
would say too. I looked again while you were talking, a pop tart could have 190 to 210 calories in one so that it's 380, to 420, for the pack. And then I went on it a little bit and asked a couple of more questions. A sedentary toddler needs 1000 to 1200 calories a day. Six to eight year old girl who's active 1600 to 1800 like there's a whole list here, but the point is, is that even a very active teenage boy needs only about 3000 calories a day. If you're talking about the teenage boy, you're giving away 1/6 of their calories to two of those pop tarts that then there's nothing functionally valuable in

Jennifer Smith, CDE 8:52
it. And giving away, that's a great way to say it. You're essentially giving away what could be quality nutrient intake that's actually helping in the growing population, you know, the little kids, the sort of pre teen, teenage years, anybody who might be an athlete into their adulthood, you are giving away what could really be boosting cellular benefit? Yeah, you know, so and relying on, you know, what portion of the American Standard American Diet is really relying on processed food for calorie intake. I think people think calories, and have for a very long time, especially since the whole low fat craze came out eons ago, right? It's all calories, calories, calories. But what do we eat food for? Yes, calories. But the behind the scenes is we want the nutrient pieces out of them, the macronutrients that we talked about, the micronutrients that we're supposed to be getting that help overall in our body, not only here and now, but long term.

Scott Benner 9:52
I'm going to kind of tack onto this here by telling you that I searched for give me 20 foods that technically contain real ingredient. It's like fruit, but, oh, this will be good, but amounts so small or processed that they barely resemble a real thing. Can I guess one, Jenny, the amount of things on this list that you've said to me over the years is actually kind of stunning, but it's stunning. But go ahead, guess one Today's episode is sponsored by a long term CGM. It's going to help you to stay on top of your glucose readings the ever since 365 I'm talking, of course, about the world's first and only CGM that lasts for one year, one year, one CGM. Are you tired of those other CGM, the ones that give you all those problems that you didn't expect, knocking them off, false alerts not lasting as long as they're supposed to. If you're tired of those constant frustrations, use my link ever since cgm.com/juicebox, to learn more about the ever since 365 some of you may be able to experience the ever since 365 for as low as $199 for a full year at my link, you'll find those details and can learn about eligibility ever since cgm.com/juicebox, check it out. This episode is sponsored by tandem Diabetes Care, and today I'm going to tell you about tandems, newest pump and algorithm, the tandem mobi system with control iq plus technology features auto Bolus, which can cover missed meal boluses and help prevent hyperglycemia. It has a dedicated sleep activity setting and is controlled from your personal iPhone. Tandem will help you to check your benefits today through my link, tandem diabetes.com/juicebox, this is going to help you to get started with tandem, smallest pump yet that's powered by its best algorithm ever control iq plus technology helps to keep blood sugars in range by predicting glucose levels 30 minutes ahead, and it adjusts insulin accordingly. You can wear the tandemobi in a number of ways. Wear it on body with a patch like adhesive sleeve that is sold separately. Clip it discreetly to your clothing or slip it into your pocket. Head now to my link, tandem diabetes.com/juicebox, to check out your benefits and get started today, I

Jennifer Smith, CDE 12:11
would guarantee that something along the lines of fruit chews or gummy bears is on the list.

Scott Benner 12:17
Number one, fruit roll ups, mostly corn syrup and sugar with a smidge of pear concentrate posing as strawberry Capri Sun fruit punch. Here's one that I think would stun people, original Yoplait yogurt. Yes, there's fruit in it, but it's more sugar sauce than actual fruit. Sugar sauce is upsetting to me. Well, it's just fruit snacks, Toaster Strudels. Then it gets into vegetable based ideas, veggie straws, which is the thing I brought up before v8 splash Spaghettios, Campbell's tomato soup. It actually says is real tomato Yes, but sugar, salt and starch dominate its profile. Garden veggie chips, which I think is a pretty popular I think they're kind of similar to veggie straws, almost potato starch, oil, few sprinkles of vegetable powder, things that are made with real cheese. It says kind of spray cheese, cheez, its Velveeta nacho cheese, Doritos, things that we've brought up before. Yep, here's one for you, made with meat. Lunchable pizza with pepperoni. The pepperoni in quotes, is usually a blend of meats and fillers, Hot Pockets, real meat and cheese are listed, but highly processed, chopped and stabilized. God only knows what stabilized means. A meat stick that once new beef is how it describes a Slim Jim that once new beef. I love that it's now filled with mechanically separated meat and additives. Chicken Nuggets contains chicken, but often ground, emulsified and padded with starches and binders. And didn't you

Jennifer Smith, CDE 13:49
tell me years ago when Arden liked them, right? And you're like, I can make these and I can make them from real food, right? It's

Scott Benner 13:56
one of the things that all I knew, is that I was not as healthy as I should be. I had kids, and I was now in charge of feeding them, and I didn't know what I was doing, and they love chicken nuggets. I said, One day I'm like, these. This is just, if it's just chicken with breading on it, why the hell don't I buy chicken, cut it up and put breading on it? Right? Yeah. And a to extend the rest of that story, it took a while before my kids were like, oh, okay, I'll eat these. Because the first time they were like, hey, actually, my son goes, This doesn't taste like chicken. And I thought, oh, in the face of eating real chicken, he's like, this isn't chicken. I was like, oh, like, what am I doing here? You know what I mean? Yeah.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 14:37
I mean, if we went down that rabbit tunnel, which I'll give a one second kind of one minute kind of thing, but it's a lot of children today. I think adults are a little bit more knowledgeable, obviously, but kids don't typically know where food comes from, right? And if we're educating, it is very and from a meat standpoint, too. It's like your son. Didn't think it tasted like chicken, because what he was getting was, as you just stated, a mix of a whole bunch of processed stuff with little tidbits of some type of factory farm processed chicken that got mulled down, and then whole whole bunches of other things added to it. And that's what they identify as chicken. It's not chicken, right? I mean, if you start showing kids where their food comes from, meat specifically, their eyes open up,

Scott Benner 15:25
yeah? Well, and nowadays, by the way, if I gave him, like a frozen chicken nugget, he'd be like, What is this? Don't give me this garbage, right? Yeah, let's move forward. Because this, I feel like he could just keep whipping this horse forever, forever. Yeah, because I have found myself, I did a follow up and ask it like to do a deeper dive on what the chicken like. The way it it described chicken nuggets like. What does that actually mean? And it's breaking down mechanically processed chicken emulsifying processes. None of this is exciting. No, not one of these things. Do you read and think, oh, I should eat this?

Jennifer Smith, CDE 16:02
No. And their video is actually their YouTube video is showing how chicken nuggets get made. And once you watch it, and the pink paste that comes out and gets formed and coated, I guarantee you won't eat a chicken nugget in your life. Again. If you

Scott Benner 16:16
ever bought one, you're gonna say, no. But have you ever bought a chicken nugget from McDonald's, and the first bite into it, you're like, This is awesome, but if it cools off even a little bit and you take another bite, you go, ooh, something's wrong,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 16:29
good. I need the whole container of barbecue sauce to put this next bite in. For me, it

Scott Benner 16:34
would be sweet and sour, but I'm right there. Okay, yeah. Are we gonna move to number two here? Yeah,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 16:39
number two, you know processed food? I mean, there are a lot of hits coming from processed foods, and they're widely available, but weight gain, obesity, I mean, they are. They're a huge piece. Why? Because the foods call in, again, high calorie intake. Processed foods contain what you've already and I've already said high sugar amounts, high fat amounts, high sodium amounts, and they don't lead to satiety, or the feeling of being satisfied in the aftermath of a meal, so you end up eating more of them, right? You don't get the four piece. You get the 12 piece, because you know that the four piece isn't going to be enough. Well, four piece probably also isn't balanced. If you put a side salad with it, if you need an apple with it, you know the balance there, right? So in terms of weight management, overall, we end up eating a lot more when it comes to processed food. To finally get the brain sensation from our stomach that, yes, you've now had enough to eat, and by that point, you've probably over eaten by a minimum of 500 calories.

Scott Benner 17:47
Yeah, yeah, that's crazy. And that's at a meal or a sitting Correct, right? And then you might do that two or three more times today, right? Yeah, absolutely.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 17:54
And, you know, I mean, in terms of those other pieces, there are books, easy books to read that have been written on what the manufacturing companies know about the hit point, right? What they want is you to become sort of encouraged to continue purchasing their product. It's like a hit, you know, you eat one of those shaped potato chips out of the cans. You mean? Pringles? Oh, Pringles, thank you. Yes, you can't just eat one, right? Why? Because they've, they've now kind of hooked you, and it hits all of the places that in your brain tell you to do it more. It's like an addiction. It becomes like an addiction, and then it's hard to break that, and it's hard to despite being a smart person and knowing you shouldn't do it, it's hard to not do it because it's become a habit that goes in your grocery cart. It comes home, it makes you feel good when you've had a crappy day, you come home and your Pringle can is there? Whatever it is,

Scott Benner 18:52
yeah, no, I hear you. So you're eating a bunch of food quantity. It's got a ton of calories in it, but yet, it's not doing the thing that eating is supposed to do for you. I used to hate ordering my daughter's diabetes supplies. I never had a good experience, and it was frustrating. But it hasn't been that way for a while, actually, for about three years now, because that's how long we've been using us Med, US med.com/juicebox, or call, 888-721-1514, us. Med is the number one distributor for FreeStyle Libre systems nationwide. They are the number one specialty distributor for Omnipod dash, the number one fastest growing tandem distributor nationwide, the number one rated distributor in Dexcom customer satisfaction surveys, they have served over 1 million people with diabetes since 1996 and they always provide 90 days worth of supplies and fast and free shipping us med carries everything from insulin pumps and diabetes testing supplies to the latest CGMS. Like the libre three and Dexcom g7 they accept Medicare nationwide and over 800 private insurers find out why us med has an A plus rating with a better business bureau at us med.com/juicebox, or just call them at 888-721-1514, get started right now, and you'll be getting your supplies the same way we do

Jennifer Smith, CDE 20:26
correct, yeah, exactly what goes along with it? We're, you know, bringing diabetes into the whole mix, whether you have type one or type two, or maybe pre diabetes, or maybe you have a family history with, you know, some type of weight management issue. What goes along with it is insulin resistance, right? And anytime we're putting in more of these processed kinds of foods, what are most processed foods? What's the macronutrient?

Scott Benner 20:51
After reading all this, I don't

Jennifer Smith, CDE 20:55
know even all the the processed stuff that your list brought up,

Scott Benner 20:58
carbs, yeah, but I was gonna say goo on my brain is completely rewired.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 21:04
Yes, it's kind of goo. It's like a paste, right? Instead of white rice, it's white rice flour in many of or whatever it is. And so we end up getting the spike, the rapid up down, because carbs get processed fast. We know that with diabetes from learning about insulin timing and all of that kind of stuff. But the more we have to hit that spike, the faster it gets processed out of our system. With the insulin that we take to management down, we swing blood sugar is dropping, and now we end up eating more and we take more insulin. It goes in, or our bodies make more insulin, you know, whether you have type two or or whatever. And so over time that hit in the body requires it to respond more and more and more and insulin resistance specific to the type two population, it means that your betas kind of get pooped out. Yeah, right. And overall, it's then a risk for those who are at risk of type two diabetes. It also, I mean processed foods, they're not great for having you have like you mentioned before about more steady energy when we were talking previously about the different kinds of diets, right? That you feel like you have a lot more stable, steady energy in the past couple of years, as you've cleaned up your lifestyle and you've made some changes to things, but processed food that call for more of it. Oh, it's out, I need more. Oh, it's out, I need more. That energy pull from the body leaves you feeling considerably fatigued, because it's not giving you anything sustainable, right?

Scott Benner 22:41
And also, then you couple that with people's sometimes varied understanding of how to actually use their insulin to begin with, and now they're putting themselves in situations where they're constantly having to eat, and oftentimes constantly having to eat, like, high sugar foods to keep you know, all of a sudden the food becomes medicine, and you can't not do it, right? I'm 77 two hours down. I'm eating sugar like, this is what's gonna happen, yeah? Oh, it just goes back. You know, it's interesting, as we continue to have this conversation, it made me wonder, what year did the book Soylent Green come out? And it's 1973 so we've been talking about this since at least, like I was born in 71 so this is a conversation in society for 50 plus years that, like, you know, you know the book? I do know that. Yeah, okay, all right. So if you don't know the book, you should look into it, right? But it's basically, it's a look at climate change, food insecurity, corporate power over food pharma, urban overpopulation, like that whole thing, of like, there's a lot of people here, and we got to feed them, and we got to take care of them, so we're going to make this goo and feed it to them, you know? And I so it's funny, because I get it, and the entire time we're having this conversation, it's not lost on me. The people who are listening are not the people who put this process into place. No, correct? Yeah, they're just going to the food store, and they're trying to stay alive, right? Like, and they have a certain amount of money and a certain amount of time, and they're like, listen, I know a pop tart is not good for my kid. I'm not an idiot, thanks. But, like, I don't know what to do. And, right? You know what I mean? Like, it's the entire time we're having this conversation, I feel that, like, just under the surface, I feel like we're saying something that is either not obvious to people or it's obvious to them, and they have to ignore it for a number of different reasons. And on top of all that, and not to feel political, but like, on top of all that, they're in a they're in a situation not of their own making.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 24:35
Correct? Yeah, no, absolutely. And it's, it's also not, you know, I'm not blind to the fact of processed foods can look I say, I would say, like, economically better,

Scott Benner 24:48
not right? But, yeah, not

Jennifer Smith, CDE 24:51
lately. But in general, like, you know, all the commercials that I rarely see if I'm ever watching television, but the things that come up, like, get them. Real Deal. You know, it's got this and this and this. And you're thinking, great, that's a lot of food. It's a lot of quote, unquote food. But really, what it is, it's a lot of calorie, yeah, and it's, it is bulk, right? And it may feed a family, but what are you missing? Going back to the nutrients you're missing, what really your body is craving. And again, it's not lost on me, either. The fact of food is expensive these days. I mean, the past several years, food has continued to increase in price. There are economical ways to eat real food at a price that could work for the majority of people. Yeah,

Scott Benner 25:41
you have to get over the hump of the I'll just call it the addiction. Like, you have to get over the hump of the addiction. You have to the processed foods that you've been eating and clear, clear that out of yourself so that you can keep going. But the truth is, is, like you, you could buy, listen, it's not inexpensive, but you could probably buy four chicken breasts for somewhere around seven to $9 like, right? And, and I weigh 180 I don't know what I weighed 178 pounds this morning, right? I can only eat like half a chicken breast. You can get three, four pounds of ground meat if you have a large family and give everybody a cheeseburger, at least it's actually ground meat. You know what I mean, so or

Jennifer Smith, CDE 26:16
making it go further, you know, things like vegetable protein casseroles or really good soups. I mean, you can stretch food to be both satisfying as well as quality, in terms of the nutrients you want to provide, even on a really tight budget. I mean, one of the things I would again, if I was going back to school for a lot of different things, I would love to be able to somebody would have to economically help me. But I'd love to, like, go to people's homes who wanted me there and be like, What should I clean up? How can I make this versus this? How can I change this versus change that? Because I think there is a want, but I think people are so lost in their habits of what does work and what they figure figured out budget wise that it's it's hard to make that change on their own. Yeah, and I feel bad about that.

Scott Benner 27:05
Just the entire time we're talking, I'm thinking, we're either telling people something they don't know and they're happy to hear, or we're telling people something that they completely understand and don't know how to escape, right? They can't apply it. Yeah, when you look down this list of I mean, you just went over blood sugar and insulin resistance. Insulin resistance. But you know, in a minute, we're going to talk about inflammation, your heart, your gut health, your mental health, right, like and risk some other chronic diseases, all from this, the root of this one problem, you know?

Jennifer Smith, CDE 27:34
So, yeah, and it, as you listed them, kind of increased inflammation, right? That's a heavy hitter. We hear the word inflammation a lot, but when we look at the other pieces here, heart health and your gut health and how your brain functions, and even those big chronic diseases that we hear about over and over and over again, a lot of them are linked to inflammation in the body. It's how the body processes a lot of different things. I mean, stress can also create inflammation, but food is a is another hit there in terms of inflammatory process. And some people might have more inflammation because their body doesn't like even if it is a healthy food, maybe your body doesn't like it the most. So that could create gut inflammation until you take it out of your, you know, out of your diet, but these foods often contain a lot more unhealthy processed types of fats. Thankfully, we've gotten rid of most, like trans fats are technically like allowed anymore, but it doesn't take care of the fat we talked about before was like canola oil and some of the seed oils and those types of things. I mean, they're in all of these packaged processed foods. You may talk about preservatives. There's a lot of back and forth. It's like a 5050 when we talk about artificial sweeteners and what that does in the body, and also the food colors and the dyes and those kinds of things. And you know, whichever side you're going to sit on, just know that they weren't really created in the field across the street, in the farmer's lot, right? They just they weren't. So we talk about inflammation, it's really boils down to, how does your body deal with it? And if it's once a year that you're eating blue gummy bears, probably not that big of a deal. But if that's something that's in your diet, on an ongoing process, I guarantee that your body is not responding well to that. Yeah.

Scott Benner 29:26
And that's tough, because everybody who's listening right now just said, Oh, my God, I have a bag of gummy bears in my house. Yeah? And listen, I buy a five pound bag of gummy bears probably twice a year. And I would say that a third of them get thrown away because they're in people's cars or they're in bags, and they get stale eventually, and, like, you don't end up using them. But right? They're also mainly how Arden, like, stabilizes a low blood sugar. Is a gummy bear here, gummy bear there. It's, I don't know, Jenny, this whole thing is upsetting. It

Jennifer Smith, CDE 29:57
is. And I that's where I'm like, God, treat your low blood sugar, slow. Right, right? Yeah, we're not

Scott Benner 30:00
gonna not do that, right? I'll explode it out for a second. If everyone was eating the way Jenny is eating, I don't think you'd have as many low blood sugars. Is that fair? Because you wouldn't be using as much insulin, you wouldn't have as many spikes, you wouldn't be making as many big, aggressive Bolus I mean, honestly, how often do you get low? Define

Jennifer Smith, CDE 30:18
low because, I mean, I define a low by whether or not it needs to be treated. I am using an A I D system, right? So I do have a saver in terms of that. But

Scott Benner 30:28
how often are you saying, Oh, no, this isn't gonna stop. I have to have something, and it's so emergent that it has to be sugary and quick. Oh,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 30:35
emergent. Very, very rare. Do

Scott Benner 30:38
you not think that's somewhat a mix of an A I D system healthy eating and exercise

Jennifer Smith, CDE 30:45
and knowledge about what my typical variables do, right and how to

Scott Benner 30:49
adjust your insulin, where it needs to be adjusted. Yeah, yeah, no. Again, like, you've been doing this a very long time, and we've talked about this before. You had a very like, you had an excellent launch into life about food from your parents, like you got, I think you got lucky there. That's, that's incredibly Yeah, 100% Yeah. Like, even as we're talking and I realized that I was able to break whatever addiction I had to food. I used the GOP to do it. Not everybody could do that. And if I didn't have that, I don't think I could have done it either. And I just had an experience with a an acquaintance the other day, who, after a year of just fighting to get a GLP medication, they got it, and now, three months later, are telling me, like, I don't want to do this anymore. And I said, why? And they said, Well, I haven't lost any weight. And that person's on the phone with me sitting outside of a convenience store having lunch. And I was like, Yeah, well, I mean, I feel like maybe you're just eating through it. Like, you know what I mean, like, you can, like, just don't have lunch here. Like, I think that would be, like, a great start. First start. It's not magic. You don't put it in and, like, you magically, like, start dwindling away. Like, it should make you not think about food quite as often so you can get over this addiction. Blah, blah, blah. And the person said, No, I just love food. And when, when he started talking about it, I realized that, like, his identity, like, you know, how we talked about in the last episode about, like, special diets and people like, you know, like, well, you know, I had a personal experience with this, and that's why I feel like this is universal truth, or it's tribalism, right? Like, you're like, Oh no, it's keto. It's the way to go. Sometimes, nutrition can be confusing or whatever. Like, I realized that his tribe is, I like food. I didn't think of that as this as a fueling plan, but it is like in people's minds, and

Jennifer Smith, CDE 32:33
what does it boil back to? I mean, one of the things that we're, you know, kind of going to get to, but we could, it fits right here, is addiction, like eating habits, yeah, and why? Right? The food, as you described, he's not sitting somewhere eating a whole roasted chicken. He's sitting outside of a convenience store eating a meal of whatever it was. But what's in that food? Again, high inflammatory types of ingredients, sugars, fats, sodium, and those foods have grabbed that addictive piece in his brain and have landed him unfortunately. I mean, he is, this is completely not a conscious thought to him. Oh no, as to why.

Scott Benner 33:15
And then once you get to like the talking about it part, it's all so ingrained, like, I really don't mean, I know this is going to sound like crazy to somebody, but he talked about eating the way I've heard, like, people talk about drugs, like, not, I don't mean, like, weed. I mean, like, you know, like, I'm talking about, like, Yo, man, you don't understand. I need the thing. Like, like, heroin kind of, like, talk like, serious it

Jennifer Smith, CDE 33:37
is, yeah, they're palatable. A lot of people don't realize, again, as we've said, food digestion kind of starts in the mouth, but a lot of people are very on a subconscious level. They like the way certain foods like feel, feel as they chew them, as their taste buds get the tastes that all mingle together, and because processed foods are so clicked in to hitting all of those places. You know, your taste buds taste different things around your whole mouth, right? There's salt in one place, there's sweeter in one place, there's sour in another place. And they've figured out how to manufacture these foods to hit all of the desire places. And then you can't get away from that

Scott Benner 34:17
to circle back to inflammation for a second. Yeah. Most of you listening already have autoimmune problems in your life, correct, right? And so you're, you're probably experiencing inflammation to begin with, and now this is probably adding to that problem.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 34:33
Yeah, and with diabetes, you know, multiple of these, along with that inflammation, inflammation pieces, you know, we know that we are more we have more potential to heart health issues, more cardiovascular risk factors. We're told about it probably every single time we go to the doctor, right? They look at your lipid panel or your cholesterol panel. They look at, you know, what's your lifestyle like, etc. But you. Inflammation is a huge piece in heart health. It's in the vessels in the body, and what that leads to in the heart, and how, how well your heart can pump, versus how hard it has to pump, to move the blood around your body, to circulate the nutrients that are supposed to be in the food that you're eating, right? And when we have the potential to have that mismanaged in our body. We want to do as much as we possibly can to decrease this inflammation. And if some of it, not all of it, but if some of it can come from healthier choices in what we put in for the caloric part of you know, what we what our bodies need, it can make a difference. Yeah.

Scott Benner 35:40
I find myself sitting here thinking about all the conversations I've I've ever witnessed online around food, talking about tribalism. Like, there are people who, once they figure this out, instead of just talking about the way you and I are right now, which I think is a very like, measured, reasonable, like, look, here it is. You know, you do whatever you take what you need do whatever you want with it, right? But there are some people who come from the like, No, you're wrong and you're killing yourself and blah, blah, blah. And I figured it out, they get tribal about it, and then these conversations never happen in community settings, because you're either a crazy health person or you're a crazy unhealthy person. And like, and then that's how people think of each other, right? And the person who's not eating super clean, they're like, I'm not doing anything terrible here. Like, I'm just, I'm at the grocery store buying food, just like everybody else. And also, like, like, with many things, eating this kind of way, like the way we're saying, like, try not to eat this way if you can. When you do that, it's not like, you have a pop tart and then you're in, your foot falls off. It's not like your head pops off after you eat, like Cheerios. It's just like diabetes really, like you cannot take care of yourself. The drift is so slow that you don't feel it happening. And then once you get there, you don't even know you're there, because it took so it took so long. I think eating and diabetes have that very much in common, absolutely,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 37:02
100% I you know, and in any health condition, which is why, you know, we bring up these health conditions in terms of that processed food singular piece, you know, we look at not only heart health, but you know, gut health, right? We talked a lot before about how food processes gets through your digestive system, where nutrients get absorbed, etc, but our digestive system is also supposed to clean out things, you know, poop, right? It's like, I was like the word poop 2o, is 2p. Is what's not to like, if it's

Scott Benner 37:31
not coming out, right, Jenny, it's probably not going in, right? That's all

Jennifer Smith, CDE 37:34
correct. No, that's it's a great way to think about it. Many processed foods are low in what? What helps you poop, fiber, fiber, right? So if you're not going to the bathroom regularly, you can start looking at, well, what's the percent of process in the diet that I eat? Maybe I could sneak in some salad every single day instead of the veggie straws, for example, right? And in terms of digestive issues, things like constipation and whatever in diabetes, can certainly mean fluctuations in blood sugar. If that food isn't processing through your system efficiently the way that it's supposed to, it will make a difference in your blood sugars. I don't want

Scott Benner 38:17
to say this because I'm so afraid you'll hear it, but I know it's been said in the podcast in the past. I watched Arden from a distance have a sticky blood sugar in the 170s yesterday afternoon, and then she doesn't listen anyway. Not only she hears this, right? They had lunch, and she stood up and she's like, I'll be back. And I was like, Okay. And then she left for a while and came back, and then her blood sugar started to fall. You know, where she went? The bathroom. She went to the bathroom. Yep, the bathroom. Things happen, and her blood sugar started to come

Jennifer Smith, CDE 38:48
down. So and then, you know, in the whole process, food, kind of consideration, what's another piece that helps things move through your body is water. Water, plain and simple, right? And processed has also hit the fluid piece of our intake. We no longer just drink water. It's got to have something in it. It's got to taste like something. It's, you know, and so depending on what that makeup is, it could actually be leading to more disruption in our digestive system as well.

Scott Benner 39:18
I'm guilty of that, of not only drinking things that taste like something I've tried so many different times, and I just, I still can't break the idea of like the problem with water is tastes like water. And I know that's ridiculous, but it literally. I mean, listen, I grew up in the 70s, like we used to have a container on the top of our refrigerator that I guarantee was 18 inches high, and probably like a football around, and it just had powder and a scoop in it. And there was a one gallon jug, and you'd fill it at the sink and put in a bunch of scoops and mix it up. And that was what you drank.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 39:52
That was what you drank, right? And, I mean, you know, water doesn't have to taste like nothing. Put a little bit of lemon juice, lime juice, put squish up. An orange slice and put it in the bottom. It enhances the flavor of the water. So it doesn't have to be truly just plain water, damn

Scott Benner 40:06
it. Jenny, I'm gonna do that as soon as we're done. There you go. I'm gonna go downstairs. I have a water jug. I'm gonna put I have oranges. I'm just gonna do that, and then I'm gonna try my hardest to drink that today instead of I'm absolutely gonna try. Is there value in adding a little like fiber to your diet? If you can't get it into your diet, like Metamucil or something like that? Sure.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 40:28
I mean, Metamucil is out there. Citrusy is out there. One of the ones that I typically recommend is psyllium husk powder or fiber, again, any of these. It's not a slow drink through the day. If you add any of these to your water, it's a you have to drink the whole eight ounce, 10 ounce glass at once, or it's going to get like sludge at the bottom. But absolutely, it could be helpful to add it in if you do know that your diet is lacking in that department. Again, we just want things moving sufficiently through your digestive system you should be eliminating every single day. Yes, you

Scott Benner 41:03
gotta poop every day. You have to poop every day. Everybody poops not. Everybody poops every day. Yes, yep, gut health too. I'll say for myself to get over a hump and get my gut health together. I used probiotics for a while. Sure, there are people in my family who, have, you know, sometimes have uneasiness in their stomach, but they're very consistent with probiotics, and it helps them a lot. Yeah, you know to help that. I know it's a thing that's probably understood by the people understand it, but not much by the general public. About You know, the gut biome is, it's a big deal. It has a lot to do with our next topic here too, is your mental health. I tell people how their diet impacts their mood. So

Jennifer Smith, CDE 41:42
again, when we have nutrient dense food, we take in the nutrients that our body truly and actually needs. Our cells use them. It sends them to all the places in the body that require this nutrient versus that nutrient, right? So when we have a lot of processed food versus the other quality types of of nutrients. Essentially, we end up having as we've already talked about some blood sugar instability. We've also talked about inflammation. You can have inflammation in the brain as well, and it really impacts your mood. Think about the roller coaster that you have in blood sugar versus a day that runs nice and smooth. There is a very big difference in what you have to pay attention to on the roller coaster day compared to the non roller coaster day, right? They impact a lot of the different refined types of foods in these processed foods that we might be eating can also affect different they're called neurotransmitters in the brain, and they can really mess with the feel good response versus the more depressive response in the body. They can disrupt sleep. How much quality sleep you're actually getting, which we know sleep is huge in mental health and also in blood sugar management. You know, in terms of nutrients, the quality would put in makes a difference all over the body, inclusive of your brain. Living with diabetes already more stable blood sugar means that you have, you have less in a way to navigate, and that can improve your mood. You're not always fighting something. You've got it navigated so that the ups and downs are truly they're there because you'd expect them to be there, and you know how to manage them, so it's less less attention from a diabetes angle,

Scott Benner 43:35
right? So your brain gets fuel starved, and that impacts emotional regulations, you can get hit with a lot of hormones like, gosh, adrenaline and cortisol, right? That could make you snappy or anxious or whatever, sure, right? Then there's impulse control problems. If your blood sugar gets low, right, impaired prefrontal cortex, yep, struggling to think rationally, lashing out before you process making poor decisions like eating. It actually says like eating four Snickers bars instead of having a meal, correct? That kind of not talking about a low blood sugar, like an emergent low blood sugar, but just in general, right? But just

Jennifer Smith, CDE 44:11
in general. And then what's the opposite? The opposite is high, I know high blood sugars, at least for me, what my my symptom that I absolutely hate, and thus really work hard to not have high blood sugars, is sleepiness, fatigue, almost like a cloudiness in the way that I move through my I feel like I'm kind of like slogging through mud. I just don't have the energy that I have, you know, hoped to have to get

Scott Benner 44:37
through the day. If you push through hunger instead of fueling you could it slows down your digestion, shifts your metabolism, fatigue and weakness sets in, and your body could start eating muscle or and breaking down muscle for energy, right? We don't

Jennifer Smith, CDE 44:50
want to happen. No, you want to keep as much muscle as you possibly can, because at some point, muscle starts to decline anyway in life. So you want to keep as much. As you possibly

Scott Benner 45:00
can. And if all that doesn't motivate you, it can affect your empathy, like the actual like communication. You can misinterpret neutral comments as attacks. You can get sarcastic cold or passive aggressive and snap at people you care about, and then, of course, regret it later.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 45:14
And with today's communication being often without facial connection, yeah, talk can happen much more frequently, right? If you can't see how somebody's responding to the comment that you've made, but it's a text message or something you've popped in on an online forum. If you're already on this roller coaster of emotion, it's going to be even worse. Yeah, you pick

Scott Benner 45:33
up your phone, you think, what does that mean? And everyone's guilty of that, I'll tell you too, online is a great example. Y'all don't know how many notes I get from people that say, Hey, I saw you deleted my comment, or you suspended me for a day, or something that I just wanted to tell you my blood sugar was low, and I'm really sorry, like, it's not how I actually interviewed a woman yesterday, before we started recording, she said, you know, you once suspended me from the group for three days, and I always thought about reaching out to apologize to you, and then just told me a story about she had a low blood sugar. She jumped on saw something, it hit her the wrong way, and she got typing, and that was it. And I was like, No, but that's this. I know that's crazy to think, but for some of you, but it could just be what you're eating, so

Jennifer Smith, CDE 46:19
some of Yeah, or how you're how you're navigating what you're eating, and everything that goes with it, and the whole general scheme of things, processed foods are

Scott Benner 46:28
harder. Yeah? And Jenny, I don't want to minimize it. Some of you might be, but that's but it also could be this, do you want to keep going? Or are you out of time? Yeah, no, I'm good. I've got about like, 15 minutes. Oh, awesome. We could finish this up. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, here's a here's an upbeat one. Go ahead.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 46:45
Yeah, risk of chronic diseases, all of the I mean, we're really hitting on the big ones that encompass the majority of unfortunately, like death in especially in the United States, we've got heart disease that we talked about, we just talked about mental health. But diving deeper is more like dementia and Alzheimer's kind of beyond, right? And then we've got, what other chronic diseases, cancer risk? Yeah, right. So we've got, I mean, there are many, many, many studies that look at food, real food, versus more processed food. And we already talked about meats, your chicken nugget example, right? But the more processed and meat process, thinking beyond what you know, we talked about things like your hot dogs, your deli meats, foods with a lot of artificial preservative, things like nitrates in them, they do have some good studies relative to the processed nature of those foods and the additives and the ingredients leading to higher cancer risk, especially like your digestive cancers,

Scott Benner 47:52
colon, esophageal, even, or No, I wonder maybe that's too

Jennifer Smith, CDE 47:58
that might be too high. Yeah, the esophagus is more relative to how your body is responding to that, like a GERD. You have this little like GERD, right? You're supposed to have this little valve at the top that doesn't allow food to come back and again, depending on maybe your body's response to food, you may actually not be tolerating some of the things that you're taking in. Maybe they are more processed. They could come back up, and that can erode things, creating more risk. There

Scott Benner 48:23
that one example, deli meats. My father in law, he thought that was like, deli meat was like quality food because it was expensive and he couldn't afford it when he was younger. So interesting, right? Like, we couldn't afford to, like, stand at the deli like proper people and wait for our half a pound of this and quarter a pound of that and stuff. That and stuff like that. But once he could afford it, he thought he was eating well, like, and you couldn't have talked him out of it in a million years. Like, I still have trouble telling my wife, because she grew up with watching her dad be like, No, this is like, look, this is us properly succeeding. You know what I mean? And I all the time I'm like, That's not food. Like, it just isn't, like, that's not Turkey. There is Turkey. You could buy it and we can make it and then take out your knife and cut it yourself and slice it up. Yeah, and I do that, by the way. And sometimes people it just sits. I'll get like, a half a turkey breast and make it and slice it, and it's awesome, and I'll pick at it, and but some people will just like, Oh, it's too like, it's almost like, it's more, I don't know what the word is, but when you make it that thin slice, it somehow attracts people's like, I don't know what I'm saying. Well, what is it? Also, it's almost like the packaging sexier, for some reason, like,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 49:34
almost. But it's also, what are we talking about in general? With processed foods, they're convenient. It's easy. Yeah, easy. You take the slices out of the package. Oh, goodness, it goes pretty far. I can make, you know, 12 sandwiches out of this pack of meat. Now, are there quality choices? Sure. Go to the deli counter, ask what the ingredients are in the deli meats that aren't packaged in plastic at your grocery store. Watch them slice it from the. Actual, like breast right? There are ways that you can still have deli meats, so to speak, that don't include a lot of those artificial preservatives. Yeah, but again, it takes looking for them and then buying them. So

Scott Benner 50:12
it's all about the pre the preservation too, about it's about them being able to unwrap it today, slice them off of it, wrap it back up, and have it there again tomorrow and the next day and the next day, and it doesn't go bad. And you know, if you took my process and just took a turkey breast and put it in the deli, it'd be bad in a few hours, like just sitting out in the air like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 50:33
And then, you know, again, other chronic diseases, and we talked about diabetes, type two diabetes, but where do things actually get started? It's something that we call metabolic syndrome, right, which includes a lot of different factors that we we kind of lump it into heart health or cardiovascular diseases, things like changes in your blood pressure, changes in your cholesterol levels. You know, even a family history of some of the things like stroke or heart attack definitely includes elevated blood sugar levels. Obviously, all of these we're looking at when you don't have type one diabetes. We're looking at more from the realm of type two. But can you have metabolic syndrome along with type one diabetes? Yeah, absolutely you can. Oh, sure,

Scott Benner 51:15
I've seen people have it. I think Arden has it from PCOS, like just, she basically has type one diabetes and she's insulin resistant, and they're not the same, they're not the same focus, no. And

Jennifer Smith, CDE 51:28
the resistance is the hard part of that. The insulin resistance, despite doing the healthy food things and getting some kind of exercise, even PCOS, is a really difficult one to navigate, because it brings in some of these things that are metabolic in nature, despite you doing your best at managing your lifestyle stuff. So

Scott Benner 51:49
it's a lot of work. It really is, like, you wouldn't, like, you know, you wouldn't bring Arden in here, look at her and think, like, Oh, she's, you know, she has insulin resistance. Like, he just wouldn't think that about her. But it's, a lot to fight through. It, really is. It is, I guess we've hit on this a couple of times. But to finish up with the addiction, like eating habits. Yeah, your

Jennifer Smith, CDE 52:07
friend was the best example. I think, you know, in terms of making the foods have been made. They're made essentially for your body to like them, your brain to like them. That's where the hit point for any addiction comes is your brain and some personalities, honestly, are much more likely to have an addictive quality to them, and because of the way that these processed foods have all of the right pieces linked together, the reason you can keep going back and going back and going back and again, because they're nutrient poor and calorically dense, you don't fill up on just a little bit of it. You have to keep going back and going back and get more of it. And again, thus overeating and, you know, triggers things in the brain that lead you to doing it more and more and more. It's like, like, Halloween, right? You get started on eating a Halloween bucket, and it's, it's so good, like, you just want to go back for another little Snickers bite. You just want to go back for another little you know, whatever.

Scott Benner 53:12
11 days later, you're pulling, like, some candy out of the bottom. You're like, I don't even like this, but hey, I don't know what this is. The basket empties. And you're like, Oh, all right, I guess I go back to my and you look up and it's the middle of November, right? You've been eating Halloween candy for weeks. And

Jennifer Smith, CDE 53:28
what does it bring in, you know, to those people who are more, I guess, receptive to kind of emotional eating, or more receptive to this dysregulation in their own ability to choose, you end up having a really poor relationship with understanding why you're eating. If you're eating to satisfy a desire, you're not eating to satisfy. The real reason for putting food in your mouth, and is that it's to sustain life,

Scott Benner 53:59
right? And it's not that there's not a balance, like, you said it earlier, right? Like, it's cool. If once in a while you're like, hey, yeah, I like this. This is fun. You know what I mean? Like, yes, I think it's the availability of the food 100% that causes the problem for somebody. Like, right? If you had to, like, get up on Sunday morning and go get a bushel of apples and squish them up to make an apple pie. Well, you'd have an apple pie once in a while, but, yes, but when there's a hand size, like, literally, a hand sized apple pie at the cash register while you're leaving the gas station, Well, hell, we can eat them all the time, right? And then it's like, well, there's three for $1 like, awesome. I'll get three of them. And, like, I don't have one for later. And then, oh, I can go wait. I can go to a big box store and get 50 of these. Like, oh, now they're in the closet. It's that, if you don't see the same thing as when I told the story about, like, I caught my little brother smoking when he was a kid. And I said, Listen, if I was you, I would just think about 10 really rich people in a boardroom laughing at you for buying their cigarettes. Like, that's kind of how I feel about the food, too. Yeah, like, someone has marketed you into a health issue or a future health issue, and they're going to be rich and you're going to be dead, and that's tough. Like, it's just what it is, you know? So, right? Anyway, no, and

Jennifer Smith, CDE 55:13
that's, it's a, it's a good example, essentially, because really, you're, you're feeding a desire in your brain that came from somebody's idea of how to actually get you addicted? Yeah,

Scott Benner 55:23
no, somebody took advantage of what they understand about how the human body works to get you to think, oh, I absolutely need this candy bar, or I absolutely should be drinking this soda. I We haven't even, like, hit on soda yet, but soda is just like, unconscionable that it's even made. And I like a glass of soda once in a while, but like, it's, it's not 1955 and you're not having a coke at the soda counter. Soda counter, yeah, it's not the same thing. You've bought 17 bottles because it was on sale, $9 for four. And you're like, Oh, it's a deal. And

Jennifer Smith, CDE 55:56
that's a very good example going to, so to speak, the soda counter for a nice glass of that they, you know, bring you. It's got ice in it, and it's frosty on the outside. And you were probably there with your boyfriend or your girlfriend who you wanted to take along with you, and it was like 10 cents for the glass. And it was a treat. However, you weren't

Scott Benner 56:16
going to have another one Until next Saturday, correct? Yeah, yes, it wasn't

Jennifer Smith, CDE 56:20
the god, there are cans of this on the shelf. So why should we go to the soda counter? Right?

Scott Benner 56:24
Right? I mean, I'm gonna guess that a bucket of popcorn at a movie in 1960 didn't like it wasn't as big as my dog.

Unknown Speaker 56:33
Wasn't a bucket at all. It said free

Scott Benner 56:36
refills at the end, and you're like, oh, it's only $20 what a deal there's free, I don't know. And then you got to go put buttery, buttery flavored topping on it. And it's probably, it's just none of it's, it's a lot of what you're doing isn't what you think you're doing, I guess is my point. So, all right, I'll let you go. Thank you so much. No, thank you. You

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DISCLAIMER: This text is the output of AI based transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors and should not be treated as an authoritative record. Nothing that you read here constitutes advice medical or otherwise. Always consult with a healthcare professional before making changes to a healthcare plan.

Scott Benner 0:00
Hello friends and welcome back to another episode of The Juicebox Podcast.

Ashley 0:15
Hi, my name is Ashley. I am the mom to Anna who's diagnosed with type one at age three. I'm excited to be on the podcast today. If

Scott Benner 0:26
this is your first time listening to the Juicebox Podcast and you'd like to hear more, download Apple podcasts or Spotify, really, any audio app at all, look for the Juicebox Podcast and follow or subscribe. We put out new content every day that you'll enjoy. Want to learn more about your diabetes management. Go to Juicebox podcast.com, up in the menu and look for bold beginnings, the diabetes Pro Tip series and much more. This podcast is full of collections and series of information that will help you to live better with insulin. Please don't forget that nothing you hear on the Juicebox Podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your healthcare plan or becoming bold with insulin. A huge thanks to my longest sponsor, Omnipod. Check out the Omnipod five now with my link, omnipod.com/juicebox you may be eligible for a free starter kit, a free Omnipod five starter kit at my link, go check it out. Omnipod.com/juicebox Terms and Conditions apply. Full terms and conditions can be found at omnipod.com/juicebox this episode of The Juicebox Podcast is sponsored by the Dexcom g7 the same CGM that my daughter wears. Check it out now at dexcom.com/juicebox,

Ashley 1:53
hi. My name is Ashley. I am in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and I am the mom to Anna, who's diagnosed with type one at age three, and also the mom to George. I'm excited to be on the podcast today.

Scott Benner 2:10
Awesome. I'm excited to have you. Anna is how old now? She is eight now, so five years ago? Yes, you bet. And George is older, younger,

Ashley 2:21
younger, younger. He just turned three. No, look at that

Scott Benner 2:24
nice little age. Oh, George wasn't around when Anna was diagnosed.

Ashley 2:29
No, yeah, it was just Anna. Anna was actually the first one in our family, not just our immediate family, but extended family, diagnosed with type one. So was a very big surprise. Any other autoimmune in your family? Well, it was interesting after Anna got diagnosed with type one, a month later, her cousin, second cousin, Mike's cousin's kid, got diagnosed with type one, and then a couple years later, another cousin got diagnosed with type one. So it's it is interesting that something you know, the virus that was circulating around in when she was three, somehow also reacted to her cousin. We didn't actually see her cousin, but, you know, things go around, right? And so something about that this now, in this particular time, I think, in our genetics versus before, where there was no type one, so yeah, but no, no other autoimmune that we know of. Yeah,

Scott Benner 3:23
she's diagnosed than a cousin. How long after, like, one month later, a month later, but not people you see frequently or anything like that. No. And

Ashley 3:33
actually, he was actually living, not in Winnipeg at the time, but in Canada and and then a couple years later, another cousin,

Scott Benner 3:40
so Anna's first, she's three, three, and the cousins how old

Ashley 3:47
he was, like 24 which is interesting.

Scott Benner 3:50
Then the third one, like 10. No, you guys must stay away from each other the holidays. Now,

Ashley 3:56
yeah, no, yeah. It's just it was interesting because then, and of course, the cousin, the younger cousin, that was diagnosed in Manitoba, as soon as we heard they were at the hospital, we're, like, texting them and, you know, helping them out before that. Yeah, there was no one in, like, our aunts, uncles, cousins, no, but nobody with type one. This is like, 2020, 2021, let's see. Let's see, five years ago, yeah. 2020 Yeah. Okay. This is during COVID, is what I'm asking. Well, the diagnoses was before COVID Fully hit, right? Because COVID Hit 20. Oh, sorry, no, this was 2019 That's right, sorry, 2019 because she's turning eight in October or nine in October. So it was before COVID hit and then COVID hit, yeah, pretty early on in her diagnosis, there in 2020

Scott Benner 4:43
did she have anything you can recall, like Coxsackie or another virus? Did she get hit hard with, you know, an illness, anything like that?

Ashley 4:52
She had a really bad case of the croup, like toddlers get that kind of thing, that bad barking cough. So I think it was. That it was quite bad. She had it quite bad, and so much so that I remember, yeah, my dad got really sick, like we all kind of got really sick. That was beginning of July or end of June. And then over the summer, she kind of seemed maybe like a little bit more tight, a little more cranky. And then in the fall, I started to notice, like she was really constipated, that the peeing lots didn't really trigger, because she was like, potty training and a toddler, and you're like, going to the washroom a million times no matter what, so that didn't trigger. And she was in diapers, but then she started getting yeast infections, and that was weird. So I went to the doctor, I was like, This is strange. And they were like, Oh, just put, you know, this cream on. And I was like, Okay. And I was like, constipated. And they're like, oh, you know, eat more fruit. I'm like, she's eating a ton of fruit. But, like, she was not, it was never issue for her. And then we went to the doctor again. And then she had her physical in October, turning turning three. They still didn't pick it up. When I look back now on pictures, I can tell in her face, but technically, she was still, she wasn't gaining weight, but she wasn't losing too much, I guess, for them to catch it. And then one day, she was just like, laying on the couch looking so sick, but no fever. And I was just like, something's wrong. I don't know what it is. I have no idea, but like, I gotta go. I gotta see a different doctor. Because the doctor I'd seen at that point, we had seen three different doctors, her regular one and two other ones, yeah. And I was like, I don't know what's going on. So I took her to this clinic we have that's staffed by emergency ER doctors, but it's kind of like an urgent care. Because I thought, you know, I think they're gonna know at that point, I still didn't know, like, emergency, right? Because it wasn't like, it didn't seem somebody had

Scott Benner 6:43
only told you that your daughter had, your three year old had problems that 45 year old women usually get, yes, yes, have her eat more fruit and

Ashley 6:52
yeah, and use some cream. So as soon as we go in and I say, say those things, those same things, and the doctor looks me in the eye and like, we're gonna do a finger poke. They poke her finger. She's off the charts, like the poker the glucometer won't read her number. So she's like, Okay, we're gonna go to the Children's Hospital. We'll let you know that you're on your way. We'll call ahead. And I was just like, and her face was just very, very serious and calm that like, you need to go now. It'll be okay. So we rushed down and got diagnosed and all that. But yeah, like, I tell actually, like, and then we got a new, new family doctor after that, because I was pretty upset that, you know, we had missed that, and that it had to get so bad of her, like, laying on the couch, lethargic, yeah, to get diagnosed. So I taught and her new doctor. When I told that story, I was like, okay, so start out, I need to tell you the story of, like, her red flags that didn't appear because it wasn't peeing, because she was in diapers. And he said, you know, as soon as you would have said about infection, I would have immediately done a done a blood blood test, like, done finger poke, a 1c like, that's not normal for a toddler. And I was like, exactly,

Scott Benner 8:01
you know, it's funny. You said something that, like everyone says, and it's the first time today that I wondered about it when they say you need to go to the hospital right now. Like, don't go home. Don't do this. Just go home. Like, it makes me think. Like, how many people are told by a physician you have to go to a hospital right now and then they just don't go like, I wonder what that number is. You know what I mean. It's a common thread through everyone's story. Yeah, doctor never, doesn't say, Don't pass go, don't collect $200 just get there. It's interesting. So, yeah, okay, so you have a doctor now you're happy with, you can manage diabetes confidently with the powerfully simple Dexcom g7 dexcom.com/juicebox, the dex Dexcom g7 is the CGM that my daughter is wearing. The g7 is a simple CGM system that delivers real time glucose numbers to your smartphone or smart watch. The g7 is made for all types of diabetes, type one and type two, but also people experiencing gestational diabetes, the Dexcom g7 can help you spend more time in range, which is proven to lower a 1c The more time you spend in range, the better and healthier you feel. And with the Dexcom clarity app, you can track your glucose trends, and the app will also provide you with a projected a 1c in as little as two weeks, if you're looking for clarity around your diabetes, you're looking for Dexcom, dexcom.com/juicebox when you use my link, you're supporting the podcast, dexcom.com/juicebox head over there. Now. This episode is brought to you by Omnipod. Would you ever buy a car without test driving it first. That's a big risk to take on a pretty large investment. You wouldn't do that, right? So why would you do it when it comes to choosing an insulin pump, most pumps come with a four year lock in period through the DME channel, and you don't even get to try it first. But not Omnipod five. Omnipod five is available exclusively. Through the pharmacy, which means it doesn't come with a typical four year DME lock in period. Plus you can get started with a free 30 day trial to be sure it's the right choice for you or your family, my daughter has been wearing an Omnipod every day for 17 years. Are you ready to give Omnipod five a try? Request your free Starter Kit today at my link, omnipod.com/juicebox Terms and Conditions apply. Eligibility may vary. Full terms and conditions can be found at omnipod.com/juicebox find my link in the show notes of this podcast player, or at Juicebox podcast.com

Ashley 10:37
Yes, yes. Her doctor right now is, is excellent and, and when I told that story, he was like, yeah. And he and he said he had actually recently diagnosed someone with type one just from their intro appointment over the phone, based on things they said. And they were like, you know, I think you need to get a blood test right away. And I was like, Oh, that's so good. Like, so but I think there is a problem, and I'm still hearing stories of folks that it has to get so bad before you're diagnosed that, like every primary care physician and walk in doctor needs to, like, it doesn't hurt to do a finger poke. And if it's not, then it's not but, yeah, little kids like sometimes have to get so bad before diagnosing. I don't know. I think there still is a lack of awareness among some doctors. Yeah,

Scott Benner 11:22
I hear you. I also wonder, like, if the symptoms aren't enough to trigger in their head, hey, this could be diabetes, then I wonder, is it also unreasonable to expect that the symptoms would be enough for them to trigger the idea of like, finger poke like, what if the like, if finger poke was like, you know, you hear this, this and this, you definitely do a finger poke. Like, how come, if you do this, this and this, you don't wonder diabetes, like, how do you get them to have that moment when they hear that that information? Or,

Ashley 11:49
I mean, the other way to go. And then what I've thought of, actually, is just at the yearly checkup, when you're doing already your shots, they're already crying. You could just do a poke. Like that would cost pennies to do a poke. They're already crying. You know, it's not fun. That would have caught my daughter three weeks before she was in DK, because she saw her physical appointment three weeks like she turned three, three weeks before diagnoses. So if they had poked her finger, just as like a normal routine thing that would have, I mean, she still was probably in DK, but it wouldn't have been as bad, because the last week before diagnosis is when I got really bad. I

Scott Benner 12:26
have to tell you when my when my mom was in the hospital and they just stuck her finger, it cost $100 every time they did it. So I don't know if it's gonna be that's how they charge for it. That's the test strip and the now, the nurse that I sort of got Yeah, it was Yeah, every time they checked her budget, it was $100 Wow. We have a different system than you do. Okay,

Ashley 12:42
well, in our system, I don't know, like, the cost to our taxpayer system when you get a shot is $7 so I think a finger poke would be less than that. Nice. There's no vaccine in Canada.

Scott Benner 12:51
I'm sure it would be. I was just saying here, here, it wouldn't be as cheap as you think. Because people say all the time, like, how come they don't just do this? Like at every doctor's appointment and blah, blah, because the insurance probably won't let them, even if the you know, the physicians wanted to do it, I don't imagine they'd be able to get it through the insurance, is my point. So, right, yeah, anyway, so, okay, so this all happens is obviously out of the blue for you, and she's very little. You guys go to the hospital. How long you there? Like, what's the first week's like, you

Ashley 13:19
know, we just, actually just had to stay the one night because their first day of training, we were so good, I guess we, like they thought we were okay enough to go home the second night. Or, I guess she wasn't so bad. So, yeah, we had training all that week, so it was like Monday. So was when it happened, when took her in, and then Training Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, actually, there's three days of training. And then Friday was Halloween, poor kid, but she was still pretty sick, so she handed out candy, and I don't know we dosed her something, but she was still kind of pretty tired and little so didn't really, really know the situation. But yeah, so we had the training and that that went pretty good. And the big, the big thing that was, like, a huge game changer for us, was getting an insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor, which, at the time, we did have a program for kids only in Manitoba, but we didn't have CGM coverage, but we have private insurance, but that didn't cover CGM because it wasn't under it's called the public umbrella of PharmaCare, which public drugs are covered not it wasn't yet to Manitoba, so, but we kind of, like, researched it. I listened to the Juicebox Podcast. I was like, listening to all this. I was like, Okay, we got to get a CGM. This is really scary. We don't know what she is, and we need to get a pump, you know, as soon as possible. So talked to them and tried the libre first, and then we switched to the Dexcom, and just loved it. And it was a huge game changer for our control and nighttime. And when you

Scott Benner 14:54
say it's not covered, the it was covered. It's covered for children, but not for adults. At that time, I know this is five years ago. But yeah,

Ashley 15:01
yeah, it has, it has changed at the time, insulin pumps recovered for 18 and under CGM were not at all for any age at that time. So we paid out of pocket. Are you to pay for it yourself, right? Yeah, which we were able to. But then seeing like the difference in that, I, along with Trevor and Ken and Liz, a group of us. We decided during COVID times that it was like December 2020, like this isn't right. Like we need to change the coverage here in Manitoba, especially during COVID times when there's, you know, pandemic and dangerous health situations and more people are getting diagnosed, we need to have coverage. So we started a large campaign, and I'm super excited to say just recently, as of today, April 15, we now in Manitoba, have one another pillar of our campaign, which is free insulin. Now for anyone with type one or type two that uses insulin, free insulin in Manitoba, no deductible. How'd you get that done as of today, well? And we have other stuff too. We have all ages, insulin pumps for everyone and CGM for everyone we but the third pillar. We had four pillars back in 2020, and the third pillar, insulin came true today. And the last pillar is insulin support in school. So we, like, kind of we drafted, like this manifesto, almost of these four things that we wanted. Let's not call

Scott Benner 16:25
it a manifesto, okay, okay, yeah, you take that out. No, no. It's funny. That's fine. Trevor's been on the podcast, right? Yes, yeah. Like years ago, yes. And then at that time, it was about access to CGM, yes, I see. How do you all know each other?

Ashley 16:44
So we met. We there. We have this Facebook Facebook group, Manitoba families for type one. Any Manitobans listening? Not on the Facebook group. You should come join our Facebook group. I would love it

Scott Benner 16:54
if you would have said you met because you're penguin farmers, but it's fine that you said it like that. What's the Facebook group called again, I'm sorry. Uh oh, she's gone. This is it, Ashley. Ashley, you're back. What happened? You okay? I'm okay, sorry. I just hit, hit a button by accident. Oh, I thought you got mad about the penguin joke. Sorry. No.

Ashley 17:15
Penguin joke was funny. Penguins in southern Manitoba, though, or polar bears. Polar bears. Polar bears are in northern Manitoba, which is quite far away from us. Can

Scott Benner 17:24
I tell you a secret? There's no penguins in Canada at all? Well, that's true, not where they live, but I just some zoos. But, yeah, look at you being very specific. All right. Well, fine. Then penguins live everywhere, where there are zoos I'm saying, I guess. Where do they come from? I don't want to say right now, because I don't want to show off that I know. So you guys all meet each other. Your was very telling. You're like, you don't know where penguins come from, idiot. So you guys all find each other on a Facebook group, and you realize, or I guess, you're talking, and you're like, Wow, this is crazy that we can't get CGM for the kids or something like that. How does that go from like, a bunch of people online just complaining to each other or wishing out loud into actual action. Like, how does that happen? Yeah,

Ashley 18:06
it's a good it's a good question. Like, people were kind of like saying, like, there were certain threads that kept coming up all the time, and it was no glucose monitor coverage, private, private or public. No insulin pumps for over 18, no insulin support in schools, and the cost of insulin so like that. Kind of those threads would come up, and Trevor and I were chatting because Anna was diagnosed, and he was someone that would help folks kind of in the group. And now I've kind of become that person too. Like, if someone's asking a question, they'll like private message and say, Hey, do you want some help? You wanted some information? And I was chatting with him about CGM and pumps different things, and saying, Yeah, I want to go down a pump and all that. And then it just kind of morphed into, like, oh man, like, there's no coverage. And, you know, our family, like, I'm a teacher. And, well, actually, that's, that's, that's, that's not a guarantee that you make a decent salary. I know in the States, it's a lot harder, but in Canada, actually, we do make a decent salary here. And so I said, you know, we can pay out of pocket, but even us like this should be covered under insurance, like if for everybody, because it's going to save money to avoid emergency rooms, like short term and long term. It'll save the system money, right? So

Scott Benner 19:21
actually, tell me, too, it's one of those situations where in different provinces, there's different rules. So you live where you live, and it's not covered at the time, but it's very possible somebody else lived somewhere else and it was covered,

Ashley 19:33
yeah. So some provinces at that time did a lot, didn't still at that time, so it's kind of been and there were organizations like larger organizations like diabetes, candidate JDRF, now breakthrough type one, like working on some of that, but during COVID, things like really shut down for advocacy, because there weren't those lobby days and there weren't meetings with politicians. And so we kind of saw an opportunity. Community as a grassroots group to really make some inroads with policy, just trying to, like, we had time on our hands, like, I like we kind of, you know, you can't do anything, you can't see friends, and so we're like, let's take this on. And we and we talked, we talked to someone at JDRF, and we had that, and Trevor came up. Well, actually, it was my mom that I need to give a shout out to my mom, Ruth, who came up with idea for the finger prick challenge. She's like, you know, maybe if you can get the politicians to prick their finger and see how hard it is and how ineffective it would be, maybe, you know, that might get them to really change their mind at flash, get media attention, and so. And then Trevor was like, Yeah, that sounds awesome. And Liz and, and then we kind of figured it out, and so we gave these kits to the politicians and and they did that, and we got tons of media. And then we had these like demonstrations at the ledge during COVID time. So it's all like, you could have maybe 10 people at some times, or 15 people spaced apart with masks outside. And there wasn't much going on, right for lobbying, like none of the big organizations, not diabetes, just anybody. Nobody was like lobbying at the ledge, having rallies and stuff. And so we would call ahead and be like, Okay, so what's the limit? And it'd be like, 10 people spaced apart 20, whatever it was at the time. And so we did one was like antiques roadshow, where we had different antiques showing that finger poking was antique. And so kind, you know, it's kind of like visuals. And we had one time we did an amazing race. We had the politicians go through different rate, you know, events. And everyone was like, game to do it, because there, like, were no events going.

Scott Benner 21:44
They were bored too.

Ashley 21:46
Yeah. So they were like, we had the Leader of Opposition. We had, like, tons of elected leaders come out and chat with us and see all that. And then did lots of virtual meetings. The big thing getting folks attention was people in the it's called a constituency, but, like, where you live, their elected representative, having people from there ask for a meeting. So we targeted, like, all the different areas, put a lot of pressure, like, with the opposition to pressure, just like media, there was a lot of lot of layers, trying to educate why it was important, why we needed to have it during a time. At the time, we had a government that was like an austerity government, the conservative it should be like the republican party down there that was not adding anything to the budget. But we had such a concerted push for the opposition and working with government that we got it like the first one was 25 and under for CGM and pump. That was the first kind of benchmark, which was four years ago, and then I think it was two years ago, then we got the all ages for pump and CGM. So we kind of pushed, pushed, pushed, and it was a huge, huge thing. No one was getting anything at that time, like nobody, no group was coming away with a win at the time, and it's awesome because, yeah, so it was super, super good and and huge. And now, like, I just, I'm so heartwarmed, like I heard a few weeks ago from a senior that was 65 and recently diagnosed with type one, and she had no idea about the campaign, and because she just got diagnosed, and she's like, she has an insulin pump now, and she's like, I'm fixed.

Scott Benner 23:24
She's gone again. You're gone. You're not there. You're talking to yourself. Muted. Hello. 65 year old just diagnosed. Oh, she's gone, gone. She hung up on herself. It's awesome. I should leave this in, Rob. We might leave this in, depends on how fast she comes back the austerity party. There's no way most of us understood what she was saying. There. Also, where's the ledge like? Is that like the train station on Yellowstone, where they throw the dead bodies. What do you think that is? I should ask about that. Ashley, uh oh, a polar bear got her. Yeah, she's dead. That's a shame. It's so cold up there. Probably the cold. Then she fell over. Immediately the penguins drug her outside, where the polar bears ripped her apart, limb from limb, which is a shame, because look at all the people she helped with CGM, with CGM and other stuff like that. But now a senseless death out in the wilderness. It's not fair. When you're breaching new lands and you're spreading humanity across the tundra of Canada, this stuff happens. It's not polite, but Nature never is. You understand what I'm saying? My god, she's really been gone for a while. I can't keep talking like that. She really could be dead. This would be such a shame. Can I call this one polar bear attack? Imagine if she never comes back and there's no updates. What if she left her family in the middle of this? She's like, this is a great opportunity for me to just get out of here. Yeah. Oh, she's back. Hold on a

Ashley 25:02
second, Ashley. I'm so sorry. I like, I like, kept talking, and I guess I hung up on you. You hung up on me a while ago. I'm so sorry. I kept talking for a long time. Where did I leave off? First, I'll

Scott Benner 25:12
tell you where you left off. But don't worry, because I filled the time nicely with a tale of you trying to conquer the tundra of Canada, but eventually the cold got to you and you were killed. Sadly, of course, because nature is unforgiving. Then the penguins drug you outside, where the polar bears ripped you apart, limb from limb, which we spent some time going over how sad that was, because you helped all those people with the CGMS and everything else. So that's what we did while you were it's like a children's story that you wouldn't read to children. You were talking about the 65 year old lady who was diagnosed, didn't know about anything, and now you found out she has a CGM, which I'm assuming made you feel like, wow, look at all the work we did. This lady's benefiting years down the road, yeah,

Ashley 25:49
CGM and a pump with no waiting periods. So the pumps, the other big thing was they used to have to jump through hoops. That was one of our demonstrations, too. All the hoops you have to jump through to get an insulin pump before the kid program, you had to have it at least a year. You had to have it a 1c under 10. You had to have all this stuff. So now there's no criteria. It's just type one you want to get a pump and, you know, you talk to your doctor about it and all

Scott Benner 26:12
that. So like, do you think you actually talked them into understanding why this was necessary? Or do you think you bugged them to the point where they were like, Why don't we just give them this so they stopped coming

Ashley 26:20
here? We did work a lot of education on it. And then, I mean, on their side, they would have, you know, pulled up research and stuff. And we had some research too, that we that we showed, but like they would have done, like on the civil service side, their own, you know, research, but part of it was education. Like our, one of our big things that I would like recommend to people at in any any country, if they have a committee meeting of their session, something on health care, we kind of, we loaded up a speakers list of like 12 speakers. So committees is like talking about a law that's going to pass. Now, the law wasn't about CGM and pump, it was about something else. But they were nice enough to just, you know, let us talk about what we were talking about under the umbrella of healthcare, yeah. And in that, we were able to, like, educate the committee members, which included folks that were, you know, on the financial kind of team of the government and the opposition people. We were able to do a lot of education. So that was really good. And we just met with so many people and just over and over. And

Scott Benner 27:21
it was your finding that, like, once they understood the situation, they were like, oh, yeah, we don't do that. That's crazy. We should do that. It wasn't being kept from you as much as it was that nobody knew that you wanted it. Is that fair?

Ashley 27:34
I think so, and that they didn't realize how important it was. And I think type one like folks and parents are often, they have lots on their plate, and it's hard to advocate. And we do have organizations that do that, but it's not like the grassroots people saying, like, you know, like, we've avoided going to the hospital because it will alarm a severe low and like, they can tell those stories which are really impactful. And then people are like, Oh, wow. Like this tech, you know, and with a pump that it can work together with the CGM, and, like, all the good things that come from that, you know, kids can do better at school, like they can be in a range for learning, and, yeah, and so all of that. And so it all kind of fits together. And then that led to our, like, latest campaign, which we have not achieved yet. We are right in the midst of it, though, like we now have a committee of Health and Education meeting together, and I really, really hope that by the time this is aired, that we have insulin support in schools, for daycare and young children, like for little kids that can't self administer. Right now, we don't, so a lot of folks, even though we have free pumps, can't get one because you can't, you don't have any help at schools or daycares for little kids. It

Scott Benner 28:44
took me a long time of interviewing Canadians to realize that, why is there so much regular and mph being used in Canada? It's because there's no nurses at the schools. That's right, yeah, of all the odd decisions, because there are plenty of schools here that there aren't nurses at and people still, they find a way to handle it right. Like, you know, there, there's schools in America where the secretary helps you with your insulin, or, you know, like, whatever, somebody in the you know, a delegate or an advocate in the school who's willing to help, you know, makes it known to the school, like, I'll help the kids with the stuff, and then, you know, you get somebody to do it. But what a strange, backwards way of doing something. Do you know what I mean, like, seriously, you're using insulin, that is, I mean, generally speaking, not used anymore. I mean, unless you're maybe really low carb, and you're, you know, you're using it for background. But, like, there's so many insulins that have been invented since then that work, you know? I mean, arguably, much, much better. And yet, in Canada, they're just like, Oh no, it's 2025 here's regular and mph for your, you know, your newly diagnosed five year old, because, you know, some of the months of the year while your kid's at school, like, who's going to give them the insulin? Is that not frustrating? Once you realize that's why it's happening, yes,

Ashley 29:56
yeah, it's extremely frustrating. And I was able, like, if I was a five. Minute drive from her daycare when she was little, and her school isn't too bad, eight minutes. So I was able to drive and then, so as I'm driving and doing like the lunchtime hustle, you run over, run back, I'm in a position that I'm not a classroom teacher. I'm in resource counseling. So I have the flexibility. My employer is flexible. But I'm like, This is not fair, that this isn't not fair, that we have to use

Scott Benner 30:22
50 year old equity. Like, yeah, it's just a strange thing. It would be like, if I don't know what it would be like, it would be like, if somebody told you, like, Oh, you're not feeling well, well, we're gonna put some leeches on you. You're like, why can't we do the testing? Like, oh, there's no nurses at the testing center. Like, could you put some there? Like, why are we still reaching back to like, such an old idea. It just smells of, of exactly what you talked about. It's just that nobody was looking at it, so it just, it's like, well, this is how we do it, so we just keep doing it this way. Oddly enough, it's not some big organization that gets through to people. It's a handful of people who met online. Like, really awesome. You know, it just really, it's a great story,

Ashley 30:59
yeah, and, and the organizations like their focus, you know, they haven't really taken on insulin support in schools until recently. I would say diabetes Canada. I'll give a shout out to Joan Jean, if she's listening, the advocacy director that

Scott Benner 31:17
she's gone this is my favorite part of the show so far. I mean, she's awesome, but the part where she hangs up on herself, because, like, you imagine right now, she's talking about Joan from diabetes Canada, and all the hard work she put in there to it, everything and and it's such an interesting so let me go over it. First they got the CGMS for the kids, and then, you know, they got that expanded to older and older people, CGM and pumps, if you if your doctor says you deserve it, there's no arguing. You just get it. Then they got I mean, we haven't even gotten to the free insulin thing. Like, I'm trying to figure out what that's about now. She's trying to make sure there's support in the schools so the kids can use their insulin pumps at schools. There's really wonderful work being done, and in a short time too. Like, I mean, five years to get all this accomplished is pretty astonishing. Actually. Do you think she's still right now talking to herself? She could be. I feel bad about that. I want to say and when you're listening back, Ashley, because we absolutely are keeping this in I do feel badly right now. Here she is. Here we go.

Ashley 32:14
I'm so sorry. I think I'm like, my cheek is hitting it. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. You

Scott Benner 32:18
shouldn't apologize. I have the greatest little I actually just did a whole recap of everything you guys have done so far, waiting to come back. Tell me a little bit about that good. Keep going. So

Ashley 32:27
the influence support in schools right now. Some provinces, which are like states, do offer it, like with support staff trained by nurses, and one province does have nurses, but then they have a shortage of nurses, which creates a problem. So we're looking at the model of support staff trained by nurses here, and now we're in kind of the committee with health and education. We just had a meeting. But it is tricky, because the easier thing is to just leave it the same, like, that's easier because schools are like, Oh, insulin. They're scared of it, or whatever,

Scott Benner 33:00
I mean, whatever. They don't want to do it. But go ahead, they don't want to

Ashley 33:03
do it, yeah, but we have CGM now, and so it kind of had to all be in order, like we had to get CGM coverage so everyone can have a CGM. So if you're like, you know, on social assistance, you don't make any money right now, you get CGM. And if you're low income, you're going to meet your deductible, your public deductible with your insulin and, well, I guess, not insulin anymore, but your other other supplies. So the point is, like all the little kiddos have CGM Now, one way or another, right? And so now we have that safety net in place that people aren't finger poking. So the risk, you know, with the with the pumps, you can set the max Bolus, you know, really low to, you know, you can set that low TO KEEP IT folks safe so, and there's lots of, you know, you can do a double check. There's lots of things you can do to keep everyone safe. But the risk of having kids on outdated insulin and not having the with with looping automated insulin devices like we can't that risk is higher than having having the pumps now, and we all, we all know that, but I think it's just kind of trickling down now, yeah, yeah. I don't understand

Scott Benner 34:09
how people's minds work. Like, well, like you're saying, Hey, we're treating these children as if it was 50 years ago, maybe longer, very detrimental to their health and their happiness and their day to day living and etc and so on. And by the way, here's a bunch of examples of people who grew up 50 years ago, and you know, some of the complications they have now, like, so and they go, Well, what if someone miscounts the insulin? Like, wow, that's the LEAP you made. Like, awesome. Like, just way to miss the forest for the trees or the ice for the snow. Yeah. I mean, earlier, you just kind of blase. We Hey, insulin is free. Now, like, how did that happen?

Ashley 34:43
So that one actually was a huge or systemic one. That one, I can't our committee wasn't responsible for that one, but we did put it forward. So which is awesome. So the whole federal government, the like, you know, you would have, you know, your president, your congress, Senate. So our. Federal Government made a deal now with Manitoba for it's called PharmaCare with no deductible. So for contraception and diabetes medication and for diabetes, so far, they're including insulin, the squamous, the nasal, glucagon and type two, Metformin, type stuff. So they will all be free as of today, with no deductible, which is amazing. And I think, I mean, why did they pick diabetes medication and contraception? Like it's kind of interesting to two things to start. But for sure, for diabetes, I think the campaigns of the national campaigns around the importance of diabetes medication in our system and all that. And we were hoping to see pump supplies and CGM in that, like, free, with no deductible. And we're not sure where that's going to end up, because there was talk about that, and then when we actually saw the document, it wasn't in there. So we'll see, like, it can be built on, though, right? It's a stepping stone. Like, that's a big deal. It's a step. It's a big deal. It's a huge stepping stone. We do have an election going on right now, though, at the end of month of April, we might have a different government. And they have said, like, so our current federal government is the liberals, which would be more like your Democrats, and the conservative the conservatives, when they had said they were going to get rid of PharmaCare, like get rid of this drug program, because it's not in their philosophy. But there has been a lot of pressure on them, so we'll see what they actually do. I mean, hopefully the pressure is enough that even if they won, they wouldn't get rid of it, but they want to do more tax cuts, right? This

Scott Benner 36:36
could just flip right back again. It could.

Ashley 36:38
It's at the whim of government, but saying that when something becomes so entrenched, like, it's free and kind of go to the doctor, it's free to go to the hospital, even a Conservative government, that's pretty hard to take that away. Take it away, yeah, you know, like, if once it becomes very entrenched, and that people wouldn't, you know, be, you know, if you're not going to get elected because of that, then they wouldn't take it away. So it just, yeah, I would imagine

Scott Benner 37:03
you're pander to your base while you're running, like, hey, we'll get rid of that pharma thing. Don't you worry. Put us back in charge, and we'll get rid of that for you. Then you get there and you go, Oh, we forgot to do that. And then just, it's probably good politics while you're running for office, not good politics once you're in office. I would imagine exactly,

Ashley 37:18
so hopefully. And I mean, then that's up to the organizations and the grassroots people to say, like, don't, you know, get rid of this. This is really good. But the tricky thing is, like, it only is starting today in the elections at the end of the month, right? So that is tricky. Are

Scott Benner 37:32
you recording today just by happenstance, and it's starting today? Yeah, yeah. I actually

Ashley 37:36
didn't even know like that when they had said it would be start in June. And then we just found out. I just found out yesterday, actually, I was reading the like bulletins from the government, because I like stuff like that, and and then I was like, April 15, okay, that today.

Scott Benner 37:54
That's awesome. You're like, a little dork, Ashley. You love stuff like that. Is that what you're saying? I

Ashley 37:58
love politics and the news and all of this, which is probably why I enjoyed doing the campaign so much. And, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I love, I love all this stuff. So it's, yeah, it's important to kind of keep informed of what's going on. But I do find it frustrating sometimes when folks, like, don't, didn't want to help out. But I do understand, like, type one folks and type parents with kids always have so much on their plate that it is hard to kind of take up extra Well,

Scott Benner 38:25
listen, it's a good example of, like, you know, politics is it follows the whims of the people who are paying attention to it. So you pushed. You got what you wanted. If somebody else would have stepped up with the thing they cared about, they might have their thing. Now, you know, yeah, for sure. Speak up. I think so, yeah, for sure. It's awesome. So how is your daughter doing? Like, now she's got her pump and she's got her CGM, and it's five years later, like, how is How's her diabetes going? Good?

Ashley 38:47
Yeah, she's, she's a true bird. She She's super active. She isn't involved in tons of stuff. She's in dance and Girl Guides and and she loves going upside down on the monkey bars. And, like, she's very, very active child, and swimming, she's able to, like, swim her laps, go on the deep end. And, yeah, she's always been super active, and that's what's been great about the Omnipod. And the tubeless has been so, so good for that, and the Dexcom. So I can't say enough about how great her pump and CGM has been for her management, and also just for her to be be a kid

Scott Benner 39:24
and just be able you have to go to school every day to give her insulin. So

Ashley 39:28
I was, yeah, well, we would split it up with our family. So there was different helper people, grandparents, someone from the team was going every day. Now that she's eight, like she can, you know, we can FaceTime her with her food. We're lucky that, like, She's old enough to do that now, so, but we were, we're up until last year, for sure. Every day, yeah, someone from the team, we

Scott Benner 39:53
got to a point where you said, like, she can do this. Like, if we're talking to her, she can push the buttons make this work. And,

Ashley 39:58
yeah, for sure. And the in the maturity level, it depends on the kid. You know, there's no set age. And then, you know, I have a friend that her kid has Down syndrome, and so, you know, then it's not an age, it's that, right? So we definitely need to have folks at the school trained to support kiddos.

Scott Benner 40:13
I mean, isn't it odd, seriously, that you can't just like that? It's that hard to get something set up, but somebody just can't agree. Like hell, I could text you at lunchtime and push these buttons for me and that the person in the room couldn't handle it. I know nobody wants but is liability really the reason there? Like, because here, I think it's liability. Nobody wants to be liable for anything. But is it the same in Canada? Yeah, I think,

Ashley 40:35
like, it's just been left out. Like, because we do right now, kids get medication from schools if the doctor signs off on other medication, including, you know, seizure medication, feeding tubes, you know, like there is lots of medication. Well, not lots. You know, medication is being delivered in schools already with the training of the nurse. Just, you know, insulin has always been left out of it, and I think it just hasn't been explained or advocated to the Department of Health like that. That's not right for kids. Yeah, yeah. So, like, it's interesting.

Scott Benner 41:07
I mean, you just mentioned feeding tubes. So like, feeding tubes, other medication, oral medication, blah, blah. There's all these different things. And then you come up and you're like, Well, can you push this button so they can have the medication going, Oh, no, that's not possible. And does anybody then asked, why? Like, what makes this different than that? Did you ever get any feeling for what the reasoning is? You just feel like, because you keep saying, like, Well, they didn't know. But like, how much do you really need to know you're giving that kid it's meds, and this kid is meds, and that kid are meds, and my kid can't have their meds. Because why? I don't see any common sense at all? Do you?

Ashley 41:41
Yeah? No, I agree. I totally agree. I think it was risk averse. And the school, like the Department of Health, is who does the guidelines with schools. And so there is maybe some hesitancy there, but there is risk already. Like, anytime you have a type one kid at school, there's risk. And if they're on mph, there's a large risk that they're gonna go low, because, you know, it's unpredictable insulin, and if they don't quite eat their exact carbs, they can shoot low, and greater risk of them running high all day. And yeah, I've had parents say, like, the schools are saying, like, oh man. Like, your kid's acting out and not able to learn, and I think it's because they're high like, the some of the schools have, like, figured it out, yeah. Like, they're like, this is a problem. And also, what happens? A lot of times, people will put kids in schools near where they work, so then they can't be with their neighborhood kids, like, I have a friend, their kid goes to school like, half an hour away from where they live, because that's where their parent works. You know, there's all these arrangements happening that the it's just wild that people are having to change their lives. You know, work different hours, work part time, just to like, so their kid can have proper health care. It doesn't make sense. Yeah, I think the next

Scott Benner 42:57
time your Facebook group gets together and decides to fix something, you might want to teach people how to do crazy. Critical thinking. It might be awesome. I think that might fix a lot more problems. It's just very interesting. It's such a simple idea, and to watch it, like, watch somebody in there just go, Oh, I can't do that. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I can't push the button. I don't want to be involved. Or, like, I don't know enough about it. Like, you what you know about a feeding tube? Somebody taught you that too. You don't mean, like, I don't know, also, like, if you want to be an educator, you're a teacher, right? Yeah, if you want to be an educator, like, doesn't that come along with the fact that some kids have things they need during the day? Like, how do you just go, oh, no, sorry. We don't want to be involved. It's a weird thing to say. You don't. It's like, it's like, if I said to you, like, I you have a farm and horses on it, you Yeah? But we don't pick the poop up. I don't want to be involved in that part of it. Like, that's too bad, you know, I'm saying, Am I making sense? Ashley, yeah, okay, yeah,

Ashley 43:48
no. For sure. For sure. Like being in schools, 100% we learn about all kinds of kids with different medical needs, special needs, you know, we work. We learn all the time about, you know, how we can support kiddos. Yeah,

Scott Benner 43:59
is there anything else being ignored besides diabetes? Well, diabetes is

Ashley 44:04
the only healthcare thing that parents are responsible for in Manitoba. It's awesome. No other, no other need. You know, asthma, like seizures, you could put seizure, you know, medication in someone's cheek. You know that's that's

Scott Benner 44:18
all, okay, insulin, no, sorry. Can't be involved. I love how you're so Canadian. By the way, you're so like, there's things you're mad about. You just, you just pause when you get mad. Do you know that about yourself? It's awesome. Like, anytime you're like, I could go off on this. You just go, Hmm, it's very nice of you, very Canadian. I think. Have you apologized to anybody yet? Today, it's early, still I did

Ashley 44:42
to you. I said I'm so sorry that I hung up on you. I am sorry. Could

Scott Benner 44:46
you say more like sorry when you say it? Please next time, thank you. Appreciate it. You're coming on the podcast today just to tell us about, like, all the things you guys have gotten accomplished and the things that are still on your plate. You know, get. And coverage at school. Once you get to coverage at school, you just hang them up. Like, are you done? The boxing gloves, go over the mirror and you're finished. Or, like, you guys have other things you're thinking about. Well

Ashley 45:08
then we'll go like, we got free insulin. We want to go free, like, pump supplies and continuous glucose monitors. It should all be free for for folks of all ages. So that would be the next, the next thing, but we the benchmark of free insulin there. The next one should be easier, but in coming on and talking about all this like it is, like a rah, rah. But I also want to just kind of let folks know, talk to your representatives, like, whether that's US, Canada, another country in the world, and like, you can make a difference even, like a small group of people, and then getting other folks to join in, like, really having a concerted effort, can make a difference that people, if you keep going, keep going, like, we've made actually really huge change in a short amount of time, relatively like, everybody wants it right away. But if you keep chipping away at it, we can get better, better coverage, better healthcare for folks with diabetes, and I think it's a population that high needs. But if we keep everyone healthy now, like, our future is bright, and so it would be amazing if we get better and better care for folks, yeah,

Scott Benner 46:13
unless you live one of those countries where they disappear, you from making noise, and then I would keep quiet. Okay, well, that's true, but I'm hearing what you're saying. Like, you gotta, you gotta get involved. Like, it's very quiet frustration, and it's not, I wouldn't call it big, but I've heard frustration from you a couple of times. Like, you're like, I don't know. You apologize for them. You say, I know people whose kids have diabetes are busy, but what I'm hearing is, but we need more people to be involved in this if you really want to get something accomplished. Is that really the rest of that sentence? Yeah, I

Ashley 46:39
think so. And I think, like, just there are folks, probably, I know in Canada there's different groups, different online groups and things, and there are people mobilizing for variety of things, for type one folks. And I think, like, the school issue in Canada is still a huge thing. We have three provinces that have support, but seven that don't so I would really encourage folks to, like, work together and and try to mobilize in the provinces for that, just with the technology and getting better and better. Now, Omnipod five has been approved by Health Canada. Yeah, I saw which is amazing. So we got that loop pump, and then we have, of course, the DIY loop and Medtronic in tandem. It's

Scott Benner 47:21
a big deal for people don't know the history of Canada. You guys are generally years behind everybody else getting stuff like that, just having it available, let alone anybody paying for it or being covered. Oh, she hung up on herself again. That's awesome. Do you think she's still talking? Let's not wonder about that again. What was that going to bring up to her just now? Oh, I remember. I'll hold that thought. Will she apologize as soon as she comes back? On lay your bets. The longer I feel like the longer she doesn't realize she's talking without me here, the bigger the story is when she comes back. I'm gonna take this opportunity to put just a tiny bit of Vaseline on my lip, which I do while I'm talking, so that my lips don't smile together. There professional secret. Is it weird that there's a giant tub of Vaseline on the desk? Sure. Hey Ashley, welcome back. I

Ashley 48:11
guess, I guess we're probably done. Why

Scott Benner 48:13
do you feel like you're done? It's awesome. I know I was just

Ashley 48:16
gonna say, I think I got cut off. Just the looping pumps are so amazing. The tech and and little kids can benefit from those so much, you know, the really small insulin doses and and not having to have needles, and being able to snack. And I just saw, like with my daughter, how awesome, and that was even before there was a loop, but how awesome the pump was. And I just knew it's not right that so many kiddos can't access that. And at that point, it wasn't the cost, it was just there's no one at school to help them. And, like, how sad is that? Like, it's not even a cost barrier. It's just, you know, there's so many folks out there doing having a hard, hard life for no reason.

Scott Benner 48:55
I'll make this other point for you, because, listen, everybody's not gonna be, you know, you with your energy to, like, you know, go organize and set up meetings and and go out there and educate. Like, everybody doesn't have those skills, right? Like, I get that, but I do take your point, though, that things would move quicker and better if more people put their voice behind it. But it's just, it's just what it is, and you have to make a decision at some point, like, I've got diabetes, my kid has diabetes. Like, these things are impacting me. I've got to make some space for this. Like, and I'll give you my listen my if you wanted to get me upset about something I'm not really upset about, but more frustrated, you'd say to me, Scott, tell me a little bit about a podcast with 20 million downloads and 1000s and 1000s of reviews and 10s of 1000s of people in a Facebook group saying, like, I listened to this series and like, look what happened. Like, I'm doing so much better, and all this. And then someone comes along and says, Just tell me what to do. I don't have time for this. That's, yeah, my favorite one is, I don't listen to podcasts, okay? Like, well, I don't know what to tell you the guy who thought. Have to give you the answers, put it in a podcast so like you're telling me, like, you can't just listen to 20 hours of a podcast to get the answers you need, because you don't listen to podcasts. Like, yeah, you seem like a nice lady, Ashley, but, but then so I feel bad saying this. But what the does that mean? If I said to you, Ashley, hey, there's a volcano coming, we have to drive away right now. And you said, I get car sick, like, I don't know, like, I'm just like, Yeah, well, today you're going to get car sick because we're going to get away from the volcano that's erupting. Like, it's a strange thing to me for somebody to come to you and say, I don't know what to do. I'm really struggling. I'm having a lot of problems. My health is deteriorating. I'm aware of all this. Can you help me? And I go, Yes, I can. Here's a 16 part series. And, oh, it's in a podcast. Oh, I don't listen to podcasts like, What the I don't even know that must be how it felt to you. I'm imagining when you're like, we need a bunch of people to support this so we can make it happen. And everybody goes, we do need these things. It's not fair. Blah, blah, blah, can you come to the meeting? Oh, not on a Thursday. Sorry. Is that frustrating? Like you, it's okay if you can. Don't want to say because you seem very nice, but did I outline it pretty well.

Ashley 51:09
I like, I always try to go to the positive. Like, the more you know, we were able to, like, draw in a lot of people in at different levels of engagement. And I would just go, like, even at the lowest level engagement, like, if everyone that's listening now in Canada that doesn't have insulin support in school would, right now, email, ideally, email and call, you know, their minister of health and their province, that would actually make a huge and like, if everyone did that, you know, in the next week, that would make a huge impact. Because they track, they track how many people are calling, how many people are emailing, and then meetings and things like that can come out of that, but they need to know that it's an issue. Yeah, and it is hard that, like, you know, someone's right to health, you know, needs to be an issue. But there are a lot of competing interests from so many things in the healthcare system and in the, you know, in the world in general, that we know, there's a lot of competing interests. You got to

Scott Benner 52:00
be in line early, and you got to have your hand out, and you got to be a squeaky wheel. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I mean, you're Canadian, so like, a very polite squeaky wheel, but still, like, if they don't know where to look, they're not going to look at you like, someone's not just going to wake up one day in power and go, You know what? I'm having this premonition that there are kids that are using old insulin because we don't have nurses in schools. I'm going to get up today and fix that like that's never going to happen. Yeah, that's right, yeah. You need people to walk out in the streets and bang, you know, bang on a pot in a pan, and scream and yell for a little bit. So, yeah, you guys did that. I You deserve a ton of credit. Like, anybody who does work like this deserves a ton of credit. It's not, obviously, it's time out of your own life. It's not easy. I'm sure there was expense involved. Getting people together to do anything is insane. Like, have you ever tried to, like, organize a softball game as an adult? Go ahead, good luck. You know what I mean? Go ahead and get 18 people together on the same piece of dirt with their baseball gloves. Yeah, you can't accomplish it. So it's more work than like, You're making it sound like it was easy, but I'm gonna guess that a big chunk of the last five years of your life have been taken up with this? No, yeah. Like, more. Yeah, more. At

Ashley 53:03
the beginning, the COVID times, for sure, was like the big push and the insulin, it's kind of been the last couple years. So, like, we did a tiered thing. We didn't take it all at the same time. Like, we worked on, chipped away, on things, having a strategy, like, definitely like to guide you, like, what do we want? And to be clear on the Ask, and then just trying to folks to jump on and and meetings, you know, with with the elected people like they do care what people want. They want to get elected again, you know. And we, when we proved even a party with the opposition, huge opposition support, which is the NDP party, pushed it forward, but the Conservative Party, which was a party of austerity, did, did do the financial for all ages, pumps and CGM because of all all the pressure, right? So it can, you know, you can get success with any with any party, if there's enough momentum behind it. Yeah,

Scott Benner 53:59
that's awesome. It's a great message, yeah, you know, in the end, like, you ever heard somebody come on the show and say, like, Whoa, I I'm having terrible outcomes with my Endo. I went to my endo and I said, like, you know, what do we make settings here? And then it goes, I don't know how to use that pump. Yeah, what's your whole job? Why don't you take five seconds and figure it out? Yeah? How many people a day do they say to like, I don't know how to use that pump. You can't go home. And then I've said it. Are like, you couldn't go home tonight and figure that out. And they go, Oh, we work a lot. I'm like, well, work. How about four more hours today to save everybody all this trouble? Like, my point here is it's weird where people draw lines in their head. Yeah, you know whether it's the people who you're looking to help, or the politicians who get to decide if you have help or not, or the people at the school are like, Oh no, I'll do a feeding tube, but I won't do this. I can't do glucagon, but I can do an EpiPen. Like, none of that makes any sense, like, so, you know. And so how do you get it to make sense? You educating is a nice way of saying it. But in the end, you got to bang on people's heads till they do what you need them to do. Like. Sometimes it just is what it is, right? And you're too nice to say that because you're from Manitoba, but, like, I can say it because I lived in Philly and jersey, so nobody expects me to be nice. Like, when I'm an asshole, everybody's just like, Oh, it's fine. He's from the East Coast. I can get away with it anyway. Everyone do your jobs. That was my point, Ashley. I had so much fun with you hanging up on yourself today. I really did enjoy this. I'm leaving all of it in. I've left directions to the editor already in audio. I'm like, don't take any of this out. Oh boy. I just want to hear you like going in and out and coming back and saying you're so I think it's really lovely. And I think it keeps the information paced well too. So Well, maybe you can

Ashley 55:40
put the commercials in the hang ups. Oh, Rob, there you go.

Scott Benner 55:44
That's a great idea. That's a great idea. Yeah, we could put an ad every time you hung up on yourself. It's awesome. And maybe more people could do that so that we can make the editing easier. Let's think about that. You're terrific. I remember having the same kind of upbeat, lovely conversation with Trevor. You guys are all very lucky you you met each other and got together because you got a lot accomplished together. It's really awesome.

Ashley 56:05
Yeah, and, yeah, it's, it's a team, team effort, 100% and and I was want to give, sorry, a quick shout out to Michaela and Christy, who are part of the influence in schools support team the latest campaign. They're kind of my my buds. Michaela has done an amazing job preventing presenting the government. So, yeah, shout out to them too. They'll appreciate that. Well, listen, while

Scott Benner 56:24
we're shouting people out, I want to thank Mike who helped me get tires on Arden's car two weeks ago. Imagine if everybody just came on and started saying each other's names, like, Oh, I just, I really want to have patty. She helped me a lot. Okay, and everybody else is like, Patty. Who the hell is Patty? Oh, the one thing I can't let you go before I ask, What the hell is the ledge?

Ashley 56:43
Oh, sorry, the legislature is, like our government house. Oh,

Scott Benner 56:47
I had it, by the way. I thought it was like on Yellowstone, where they throw the dead bodies over at the train station. Like you were like, we all got together at the ledge, and I was like, Oh, this seems like something very sinister, but Oh,

Ashley 56:58
my goodness, you're right. I did not explain that. Okay, yeah, so like the House of Representatives, or, like, you know, like a large historic place where the government meets. Okay,

Scott Benner 57:08
you're, I hope I didn't ruin the train station, for anybody who hasn't watched Yellowstone yet. Nevertheless, like you, the way you said it, I was like, Oh, I thought it was a, like, a, like, a physical place like you like, in my mind, you were like, I don't know it was like, Canada's version of, I don't know, red rock or something like that. Anyway, it's funny. What should we call this episode? I think we might call it disconnected Canada, because you hung up on yourself so many

Ashley 57:35
times. Okay, though connected, because it was all about connection. How about reconnecting

Scott Benner 57:41
Canada? Okay, that's better reconnecting Canada. I like that, yeah. All right, that's awesome. I can't say Manitoba, because people don't even think that's a real

Ashley 57:51
place. No, you can see Canada, yeah, that's fair. All right, Ashley, hold on one second for

Scott Benner 58:02
me. I A huge thanks to my longest sponsor, Omnipod. Check out the Omnipod five now with my link, omnipod.com/juicebox you may be eligible for a free starter kit, a free Omnipod five starter kit at my link, go check it out omnipod.com/juice box, Terms and Conditions apply. Full terms and conditions can be found at omnipod.com/juicebox. Today's episode of the juice box podcast is sponsored by the Dexcom g7 and the Dexcom g7 warms up in just 30 minutes. Check it out now at dexcom.com/juicebox,

thank you so much for listening. I'll be back very soon with another episode of The Juicebox Podcast. If you're not already subscribed or following the podcast in your favorite audio app like Spotify or Apple podcasts, please do that now, seriously, just to hit follow or subscribe will really help the show. If you go a little further in Apple podcasts and set it up so that it downloads all new episodes, I'll be your best friend, and if you leave a five star review, ooh, I'll probably send you a Christmas card. Would you like a Christmas card? I created the diabetes variables series because I know that in type one diabetes management, the little things aren't that little, and they really add up. In this series, we'll break down everyday factors like stress, sleep, exercise and those other variables that impact your day more than you might think. Jenny Smith and I are going to get straight to the point with practical advice that you can trust. So check out the diabetes variable series in your podcast player, or at Juicebox podcast.com Hey, what's up, everybody? If you've noticed that the podcast sounds better and you're thinking like, how does that happen? What you're hearing is Rob at wrong way recording, doing his magic to these files. So. So if you want him to do his magic to you wrong way recording.com you got a podcast. You want somebody to edit it? You want rob you?

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