May something be shocking, it does not necessarily mean that it serves.It is the first reflection that awakens the campaign launched from the Thailand Diabetes Association, where they are simulated, with graphic design, body injuries from sugary foods such as sweets and chocolates.
Injuries that impress, but that apart from moving away- designed- from those that occur in real life for bad control, we will comment why they are also a skinny favor towards awareness.This, beyond the artistic one, deserving of prizes.
Inevitably the campaign brings me to my memory that well -known advertising where the models paraded through a catwalk wearing animal skins that later began to bleed, splashing the public.
It was a before and after.Society began to be ashamed of that type of coat.Person with diabetes for now, unfortunately, cannot detach themselves from it and must learn to live with it.
The advertising campaign induces two errors.One is the abandoned conception of medicine where, people with diabetes were restricted to the slightest expression the intake of carbohydrates, such as foods based on flours, fruits and foods of plant origin in general.
During generations, this conception allowed distinguishing the distance to people with diabetes because of their aspect of quixotic thinness, and by the way, nothing healthy.
Today the scientific evidence and teaching of Argentina to the world by one of the parents of diabetology and nutrition, as was Dr. Pedro Escudero, allows us to know that a person with diabetes needs approximately 50% of their planfood, be it based on carbohydrates, and among them 5% of simple sugars, such as those shown in the campaign graphics.
People with diabetes are not allergic to sugar.They have an insulin deficit that prevents them from assimilating that valuable source of energy that is glucose, and all the therapy that exists is oriented to correct this situation.Certainly in diabetes today are more than not, the important thing is to know how much of each food, at what time and how to combine them to optimize metabolic control.
The other mistake is to pretend to educate or raise awareness from fear.By the way, we fully agreed to educate the population to have a healthy lifestyle and limit the use of processed foods, refined and concentrated as a means to avoid obesity, which in those who have the genetic predisposition accompanies the diabetes in a linear way.
The theme, here, is the form.Numerous pedagogues and psychologists coincide in their low effectiveness.
The times where the letter enters with blood was argued, were scientifically perimated.Fear does not motivate, it does not stimulate: it only paralyzes.Educating from fear is, in a nutshell, a clumsy, harmful and ephemeral resource.
In the daily practice of medicine we see how people glimpse foolishly when they hear the diagnosis of imminent complications that we can eliminate or minimize today with early detection and timely treatment.Eradicate that the diagnosis is a sentence, is the great communicational challenge and the goal of medicine in this field.
*Gabriel Lijteroff is Chief of Diabetology at Santamarina Hospital and director of the Scientific Committee of the Argentine Diabetes Federation.