Windsor celebrates world diabetes day

 

The Canadian Diabetes Association is holding the Windsor Food and Fun Fair for Healthy Living in the WFCU Centre for World Diabetes Day.

The fair is a free event to teach people with diabetes about managing their health. Fifteen exhibits will be featured including Eat Right Ontario, Diabetic Wellness and Life After 50. Fitness instructor, Stephanie Diago, will hold an exercise demonstration. Belly dancers will perform and Nature Fresh Farms chef, Henry Furtado, will teach how to cook healthy meals and snacks.

Attendees can fill out an evaluation form to be entered in a raffle. The winner will choose a prize between a VIA Rail round trip for two to Montreal or a Caesar’s Windsor dinner and show package.

Diabetes occurs when the body cannot produce insulin or can not use the insulin it produces. However, type one can be managed by insulin and type two by exercise.

“We want to promote a healthy lifestyle and let everyone come to get all of the resources they need for a healthy lifestyle,” said Windsor and district branch coordinator Joyce Montrose. “Lifestyle has become sedentary. People buy fast food and as a result get diabetes earlier.”

 

The Canadian Diabetes Association has a clothesline program, which accepts donated clothing from the community and sends them to Value Village. Over 105 million pounds of clothing have been diverted from Canadian landfills through the clothesline program.

Someone with diabetes is three times more likely to be hospitalized with cardiovascular disease and twelve times more likely to develop renal failure. Diabetes also causes other health problems such as low blood pressure, kidney failure, cellulitis, blood clots and diabetic retinopathy.

Jane Makse, 68, has had type 2 diabetes for five years. Makse takes two daily pills of metamorphine with each meal. She must continually get her eyes examined by a doctor for diabetic retinopathy, which is the result of damage to the blood vessels that nourish the eyes.

Makse said she handles her diabetes with exercise.

“I joined a gym and it keeps me busy. It helps with my sugar,” she said.

According to the Canadian Diabetes Association over 49,000 people in Windsor-Essex county are diagnosed with diabetes and about 20 Canadians are diagnosed with the metabolic disease every hour.