#1832 Ninja Training, Mom Guilt, and Pop-Tarts

Bethany shares her daughter's recent diagnosis , overcoming the mom guilt of ignoring early symptoms , and how she translates the podcast to her stay-at-home husband.

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Key Takeaways

• Bethany Googled her daughter's symptoms eight months before diagnosis but dismissed diabetes because she only knew about type 2 - highlighting how lack of type 1 awareness delays diagnosis even when parents notice something is wrong.
• Family autoimmune history matters more than you think - Bethany discovered her "hypochondriac" family actually had multiple undiagnosed autoimmune conditions (celiac, hypothyroidism, rheumatoid arthritis) that she had dismissed for years.
• The podcast's influence creates ripple effects: a diabetes educator who improved her own T1D management now teaches those methods to families, and previous T1D families at Jordan's school had already implemented 504 plan advocacy, making the transition easier.
• Dramatic improvement is possible quickly - Bethany went from 24% time in range to 83% in just two weeks after a "ninja training" class that condensed podcast concepts, followed by listening to the fat and protein series.
• Thyroid guidance for caregivers: if TSH is over 2.1 with symptoms, push for medication even if it's "in range"; ferritin under 70 can cause fatigue even when in range; silent celiac is worth investigating if you have iron issues.

Resources Mentioned

• Omnipod 5 - Free starter kit available, no four-year DME lock-in through pharmacy
• US Med - Diabetes supply delivery with automatic reorder reminders (888-721-1514)
• Juice Cruise 2026 - Listener cruise with stops in Puerto Rico
• Episode 413 - Deep dive on thyroid issues and management
• Fat and Protein Series - Understanding extended bolusing for complex meals
• Pro Tip Series - Condensed practical diabetes management strategies
• Small Sips Series - Curated takeaways voted most helpful by listeners
• 504 Plan Templates - School accommodation resources at juiceboxpodcast.com

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Scott Benner (0:00)

Welcome back, friends. You are listening to the Juice Box podcast.

Bethany (0:14)

My name is Bethany. I am the mom of two, a 13 and 10 year old. And my 10 year old has type one diabetes, and she was diagnosed in June 2025, so just this year.

Scott Benner (0:26)

The podcast contains so many different series and collections of information that it can be difficult to find them in your traditional podcast app sometimes. That's why they're also collected at juiceboxpodcast.com. Go up to the top. There's a menu right there. Click on series, defining diabetes, bold beginnings, the pro tip series, small sips, Omnipod five, ask Scott and Jenny, mental wellness, fat and protein, defining thyroid, after dark, diabetes variables, grand rounds, cold win, pregnancy, type two diabetes, GLP meds, the math behind diabetes, diabetes myths, and so much more. You have to go check it out. It's all there and waiting for you, and it's absolutely free. Juiceboxpodcast.com. While you're listening, please remember that nothing you hear on the Juice Box podcast should be considered advice, medical or otherwise. Always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan or becoming bold with insulin.

Sponsor Messages

Scott Benner (1:29)

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. Today's episode is also sponsored by US Med, usmed.com/juicebox, or call 888-721-1514. Get your supplies the same way we do from US Med.

Bethany's Story Begins

Bethany (2:09)

My name is Bethany. I am the mom of two, a 13 and 10 year old. And my 10 year old has type one diabetes, and she was diagnosed in June 2025. So just this year.

Scott Benner (2:19)

Oh, goodness. Very, very recently.

Bethany (2:22)

Yes.

Scott Benner (2:22)

How about that? Was this a surprise, or was it a thing you saw coming?

Bethany (2:29)

I did not necessarily see it coming. I mean, I think I know you talk about, like, mom guilt a lot, and I think the guilt that I have is that I started googling some of her symptoms eight months, like, almost a year before she actually got diagnosed in DKA, and I didn't, like, take the next step. That's one, I think, positive benefit I've gotten from listening to the podcast is that you have some amazing people who are really good at advocating for themselves in the health care system, and I was not very good at that. And I kind of considered myself a little bit of a hypochondriac. So I would say for about eight months, I knew something was up. I had googled that it could be stress hormones or diabetes, and I honestly didn't know anything about type one diabetes. Mhmm. I only knew type two, and I was like, well, this kid clearly doesn't have type two. So I would say for, like, about a month or two before we finally got her diagnosed, I was pretty sure she had a blood sugar issue of some kind, but didn't know exactly what it was. But we don't have anyone else in our family with type one, so it wasn't necessarily on my mind.

Scott Benner (3:32)

You know, it's funny. You and I chatted for just a couple of minutes before we started, and you came off as so, bold to me, but you're not. No. Oh, well, that's interesting. But you're such a good speaker. Did I misread that for that maybe? Do you have a job where you speak a lot?

Bethany (3:49)

I do. Yeah. I'm the president of a sales organization, so I'm pretty good at speaking usually. Maybe not today. We'll find out.

The Juice Cruise Story

Scott Benner (3:56)

No. No. K. You're right. It's like, watch me set myself up here. I'll just bump right through everything. I just was on a cruise, and we did a couple of stops. And just a tiny bit of context, I'm taking a bunch of listeners on another cruise in June. It's called, Juice Cruise 2026. You should click on the link and go learn more about it. If you're a cruiser, I think you'll really enjoy it. One of the, stops for the Juice Cruise is Puerto Rico. So my wife and I just went on a cruise last week. Basically, it was like a taste test. So I was allowed to go on to get a vibe for the boat, make social media videos to share with people, stuff like that. And thanks so much to Celebrity for inviting me, and it was very nice. Now I feel like I have to say this. I had to pay my taxes on the trip. I had to fly myself there, put myself up. The cost of the cruise was taken care of by Celebrity. So thank you very much. We got off at Puerto Rico, and my wife and I decided to do a walking tour of the island. But it was a guided walking tour. And this 19 year old kid comes up, introduces himself. His name was Diego. And he set about maybe giving us the most complete, lovely, well thought out formulated breakdown of the history of the island and the people and what we should know and what we should care about and how things got to be. He was just excellent. What a great speaker. And we get to the end, and he walks us back to the ship, and we're, the last people there because a lot of people went and still went around the island. My wife and I were like, okay. That's enough walking for today. We're going back. I was giving him a tip, you know, financial tip, and I said, can I tell you something real quick before you go? I said, you were awesome. And my wife was very effusive and explained to him how well she thought he did. He wants to be a teacher. He was really great. And I said, but you have a a connecting word and it breaks the flow of your conversation. And I was like, do you wanna know what it is or would you prefer not to know? And he thought about it for a second. He goes, no. Tell me. And then I just, you know, I just said, look. When you get done with a thought, you say okay. But you say you're checking with us. And I said, and you've done such a good job of explaining what you're saying. You have such authority, clarity. Don't end your thought with, okay, like that. Yeah. Because it takes away all your power and it breaks the flow of your conversation. I was like, just pause quietly and then move on. And he was like, thank you so much. I'm like, I'm gonna remember that. And he's like, why did you hear that? And I said, oh, I make a podcast and I have like a thousand connecting words that I use that I I write down on sticky notes and try to stop myself from saying some with more success than others. But, anyway, I didn't wanna set you up to be like like, I'm great. I speak for a living, and then you're just all, like, tripping over yourself and everything.

Bethany (6:39)

100% what would happen. Yes.

Family Autoimmune History

Bethany (6:59)

I definitely have an authority that you have to carry at work that does not always transition, especially over to whatever reason, like, authority. I think I have just, like, a sense of authority. So, like, you know, police officers and people at the school and doctors, nurses. Like, I think I didn't realize how much you have to push within the medical system. And I have a lot of family history of autoimmune, and autoimmune is kind of hard to prove or hard to get diagnosis is on. So I really grew up with a family that I was like, man, you guys are all a bunch of hypochondriacs. And so it was hard for me to really push past that, especially with Jordan getting diagnosed to say, hey. If you think something's wrong, there probably is something wrong, and you really have to push to get that answer. I usually think, like, this person went to school. They've studied all these years. They know. And this whole experience has really taught me that, like, they can't know everything, and they don't know all the details.

Scott Benner (8:18)

You've uncovered a lot of interesting things here. First, let's give me credit for pimping the cruise and highlighting the difference between being a confident speaker in some situations than others and opening up this other thing about you growing up. I really have done a masterful job right here. Let's move on. Juiceboxpodcast.com/juicecruise. Now, Bethany, what do you mean? You're growing up with a group of people who all had autoimmune stuff that they were having trouble getting diagnosis for, and you saw your family and your extended family members as a bunch of complainers?

Bethany (8:49)

Yeah. Absolutely.

Scott Benner (8:50)

Tell me more.

Bethany (8:51)

I think when we were in the hospital with Jordan and they're going through family history and they start asking about, do you have a history of any of these things? And I'm like, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. This person has all of these problems.

Scott Benner (9:03)

But I thought they were making them up.

Bethany (9:04)

I thought yes. Honestly. Like, my husband was even like, yep. Are any of these actually diagnosed? I'm like, well, if one person is celiac and three others have gluten sensitivities or wheat allergies, it would tell you that there is something going on there. So, yes, I did honestly believe a lot of times that they were just complaining and that they didn't have diagnosis for these things. So it's like, do you really have what you think you have? And then, you know, the doctor looked at me, she was like, okay. So it's it's from you. I was like, oh oh, I guess, yeah, I guess it is.

Scott Benner (9:34)

Well, can't we dig into his life a little more? There might be something there.

Bethany (9:37)

Right? I was like, nothing? Like, are you sure he had no contributing factors? But it was pretty much me. I found out a lot about my family after that diagnosis. They're like, oh, yeah. Hypothyroidism, and I have low blood sugar issues, and I have, you know, celiac, and just all these things came out. Your grandma had rheumatoid arthritis and just finding out that they were all related. So it gave me a little bit more respect maybe for my family members and an internal apology that I issued for thinking that they were all kind of, full of it sometimes and also just an understanding of how all of that is interconnected.

Thyroid Testing Advice

Scott Benner (11:42)

Anybody anemic, low iron, low energy?

Bethany (11:45)

Not that I know of. Although, I get tested for low iron and anemia probably every five years. Some doctor will be like, maybe you're tired because you're anemic, and I get a test done. And it's always negative. So I think that probably is in the back of my mind too a lot of times, but not anemia.

Scott Benner (12:02)

You ever get your thyroid checked?

Bethany (12:04)

I actually just did. Through all of this, we've realized we need to be a little bit more proactive about our health care. So I actually just had a test ran last week, and I'm getting the results next

Scott Benner (12:13)

Okay. Let me tell you a couple things real quick. Yeah. On the anemia thing, if your ferritin is 70 or under, they're gonna tell you it's in range. I'm gonna tell you it could be the reason why you're tired. Mhmm. Okay? And iron infusion. Don't let them be like, take an iron tablet. It'll go back it'll go back nine years from now. You'll eat a whole field full of cows before your iron will go back up. So an iron infusion, you're especially if your insurance will cover it, is a quick way. Also, it's possible that you might have something called silent celiac if you have an iron issue. Look into that. And your TSH, if you have thyroid symptoms and your TSH is over, like, 2.1, say it's, like, 2.5, they're gonna be like, oh, it's in range. It's not that. But if you have thyroid symptoms and you have an elevated TSH over, like, two, two point one, you would probably benefit from the medication.

Bethany (13:04)

Okay.

Scott Benner (13:05)

Don't let them strong-arm you out of it because they don't understand the difference between green on the test and actual therapeutic needs.

Bethany (13:13)

Okay.

Scott Benner (13:14)

Okay.

Bethany (13:14)

I'll keep that in mind. I'm super fortunate. I think that's, like, one of the things that I said when I first reached out to you is just, like, I think we're so fortunate to have good people in our corner, and our general practitioner is one of the first people that when I told them what was happening with Jordan was like, you have to get in, like, today. Mhmm. Like, this is not a joke. You gotta get in. And has helped, you know, get testing done for my other daughter and, you know, is running these tests. So I think I'm pretty fortunate, but I am still gonna write these down because Yeah. I would get strong armed out of it.

Symptoms Before Diagnosis

Scott Benner (14:34)

Okay. So eight months, you're googling things. And what stops you from putting together what you googled and what you're seeing, is it that a, you just said, oh, that kid clearly doesn't have type two diabetes, so I'll stop thinking diabetes, or was it your nervousness to find out the truth?

Bethany (17:23)

It just kept saying diabetes, and I only knew about type two. So, like, I truly did not know anything about type one. Yeah. So I think that was a piece of it. And I think, like, looking back on it, I think that she was going through honeymoon phases where she'd have issues for a little bit. She, you know, would have issues with wetting the bed or and things that just this kid had never had. And then it would go away, and she'd be good for a couple months or, you know, a month. And then it was little things that didn't really tie together until it got to a point where it was so obvious something was wrong. I think also I have a niece who has bladder issues, and my husband's family would say, like, bladder issues run-in their family, especially with kids. And so I was kinda like, well, maybe that is what it is, and that is what the problem appears to be. It also talked a lot about, like, hormones and stress when I googled it, and we were in the process of moving. We had family moving into town. She was going through, like, what I would consider hormonal type changes. And so I thought, okay. That's that seems more realistic and probable than diabetes until, like, the last months before we actually took her in. I started to see, like, very direct relationships to her food and how she was acting beyond hangry if we had a plan for food and then the plan didn't happen or having a slushie that day and then not feeling good that night. And that's when I started to realize there's a direct relationship between these two things happening. And then, you know, as they got worse, I was like, we have to get this figured out. But it took a while for me to get there.

Diagnosis Day

Scott Benner (19:28)

So you get her to the hospital, but in DKA. So what are those last hours like?

Bethany (19:33)

Yeah. So I had reached out to our general practitioner, said I think she might have a UTI. Here's all the symptoms. She's drinking a ton of water. She's going to the bathroom all the time. I just need to get her checked. You know, they responded back that afternoon, and I didn't see the message. They called me, and they said, hey. Can you get her in first thing in the morning? And that didn't really ring any bells to me that they were being that urgent about it. But my husband was taking her golfing. He's a stay at home dad, so they were going golfing that morning. And, you know, they're both irritated that I'm delaying their tea time. It was funny that morning, I had offered her a Pop Tart. Really just because I wanted to eat the other Pop Tart. And she was like, no.

Scott Benner (20:09)

Bethany, you were like, I want a Pop Tart, but I'm an adult.

Bethany (20:13)

A 100%.

Scott Benner (20:14)

If I can get this kid to eat one, then I'll be able to go I can

Bethany (20:17)

have the other one.

Scott Benner (20:18)

It's open. I should just eat this.

Bethany (20:20)

Yeah. She was like, no.

Scott Benner (20:22)

Please tell me how old you are.

Bethany (20:23)

38.

Scott Benner (20:24)

That's awesome. Keep going. I'm sorry.

Bethany (20:26)

So I'm 38. I'm offering this nine year old a pop tart. I'm like, no. Seriously. Eat it. She's like, no. I really think I have to start eating better. And I was like, let's start on Monday. Like, let's start the diet Monday. We don't need to do that today. So I forced her to take the Pop Tart and

Scott Benner (20:41)

You forced her to you can't just eat this thing so I can have one.

Bethany (20:43)

Alright. The golf course. You're gonna get hungry. Like, you get hungry when you golf. So, you know, I gotta call an hour later. Hey. You know, the doctor says she has type one diabetes. I have no idea what's going on. They told us to go to children, and, you know, do you want us to come pick you up? And that kinda started the whole process. She was just kinda barely in DKA, so they said we caught it. They said, like, within three days, we would have been in the ICU no matter what.

Scott Benner (21:13)

I see.

Bethany (21:14)

And so we have a satellite children's hospital in our area, but it's not a very big area. They don't have overnight care in the endocrinology unit. So they flew us down to Little Rock. So we had to take a Life Flight that day to get down there, and we spent the next three days in the hospital just learning how to manage all of this.

Stay-at-Home Dad Discussion

Scott Benner (23:01)

By the way, respect to him tricking you into paying his bills. I did it to a a lovely woman too.

Bethany (23:08)

He always says he knows when to invest because we got married when we were 18. So he's like, I knew early. I invested early.

Scott Benner (23:13)

Oh my god. My wife was in college. I was like, this girl's gonna make money. I was like, I can't I could tell right away. It's like, she's smart, hardworking, smart. She's pretty. What am I doing here?

Bethany (23:23)

Right. You gotta take your chance.

Scott Benner (23:24)

I ain't letting her talk to anybody else. Take your shot. He got you when you were 18.

Bethany (23:31)

Yeah. We were still in high school.

Scott Benner (23:32)

He did trick you.

Bethany (23:33)

Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Benner (23:33)

Yeah. Yeah. How do you do it? Is he super handsome?

Bethany (23:38)

Yeah. I think he's pretty good looking. He's a hard worker, good guy. He's got a good personality.

Scott Benner (23:44)

Hard worker. I've been a stay at home dad. Let's not oversell that. So

Bethany (23:48)

I mean, he would probably agree. He would probably say the same thing. He says he's living the dream.

Scott Benner (23:53)

Oh, it's awesome. I swear to you, there was a time in my life where if someone would've made me go back to work, I would've cried. I would've just stood up and just burst into tears. I've been like, no. I love my life.

The Podcast's Impact

Bethany (27:10)

But that made us think of an impact because you have, Scott. And I think that's, one of the reasons why I reached out to you is because, to be fair, I also told you our story was boring. But, you know, it's because I really have felt the impact of the work that you've done and how it got to our area before we had this diagnosis. And we've definitely had the benefit of people taking the work that you're doing and, like, moving it forward. So

Scott Benner (27:36)

Can you explain that to me? Yeah. I'm sorry. Thank you. That was very nice. I appreciate that. But but explain that part to me. Like, I'm not dismissive. I just I don't wanna sit and make it feel like you're saying nice stuff to me. And I'm trying to find out what you meant by that. Like, people took it and did what? What is that piece?

Bethany (27:52)

Oh, I mean, I think the first month of after diagnosis, we got the do not die, you know, education in the hospital and the one you know, the three inch binder of information. And, that first month for us was super rough. Like, we didn't know about goals. We were just kinda told to stay higher because coming down fast is dangerous. Had been told to pre bolus. We had an average blood glucose of, like, over 200 that first month. And then we had a follow-up four hour education meeting. And our second diabetes educator is amazing. She has type one, but she gave us what she called ninja training. And that was basically, like, if you took the pro tip series and condensed it to, like, a four hour in person class, that's what it was.

Scott Benner (28:34)

Mhmm.

Bethany (28:34)

And she talked about your podcast quite a bit, and she had all of the episode lists printed out at that time on the table. And it was like, you can call me anytime you want. If you start listening to these, they're gonna get you through all of this. Oh. So I had that. And then my daughter's school has two other kids that have type one, and those parents really, like, took your advice and lists, and they, like, implemented it. So we walked into a school where every single teacher and employee has already had emergency diabetes training every single year. The nurses knew what to do, and, you know, there are specific teachers who had already taught these kids. And so they had really gone through all the hard work of, like, advocating, getting processes put in place. You know? So we were able to get a huge benefit from that, I think.

Scott Benner (29:24)

Can I ask you a couple of questions? Yeah. First of all, I realized I'm so relaxed and happy since my vacation, juiceboxpodcast.com/juicecruise. My emotions are very, like, raw right now. I'm not all like I would normally be a couple days before Christmas. I don't feel harried or crazy. I can't believe this is the first time I've ever gone on vacation right before Christmas. What a great thing to do. Leave your anxiety behind and do that, people. It's awesome. Make sure I'm I'm understanding you correctly. I'm not trying to take credit from anybody, but the hospital setting, when you're getting your training, there's a person talking to you, and now you've listened to the podcast since then. Right? Yeah. Is that person and I'm not trying to take anything away from them. Are they talking to you through a lens of having listened to this podcast, or are they a person who really understands the whole thing and offered you the podcast as a way to take that idea home with you? And I'm not trying to take credit for their knowledge, but if it is a thing that came from the podcast, I am interested to know that.

Bethany (30:21)

I don't know for sure. Mhmm. But she did say that she hadn't been taking care of her type one diabetes up until a few years ago and that she had listened to your podcast and then went and got like, she is obviously, like, in the endocrine system. I mean, she has the knowledge now, and I think that that's a piece of it. Like, she truly understands it. But she definitely told us, like, you need to go listen to this to take this home with you so you can keep getting the education that you need.

Scott Benner (30:50)

Two thoughts. Mhmm. If that person is listening, please come on the podcast and tell me that story.

Bethany (30:54)

I will tell her too.

Scott Benner (30:55)

Please. And my second thought is and please, I hope this doesn't sound self serving because I don't mean it this way. When you were saying that, I thought very quietly in my head, I thought, oh, I did it. Yeah. Like, I accomplished the thing I tried to do. I felt so accomplished at that moment. Like, you're telling me that I found a person with type one diabetes who is also a diabetes educator, and the thing that I gave them elevated their own health, and then they passed it on to you.

Bethany (31:21)

Honestly, 100%. Like, that is the main reason I reached out with to you is just to, like, thank you and tell you that. Like, it can be frustrating to think, like, you're not having the impact that you think you you should be having. I think I had seen a post where you had said something like that. And here I am sitting here, like, knowing that the thing that you are talking about, at least in my area, it's happening and working. And, I mean, we went into that class 24% in range. And in the two weeks after that, we were eighty three percent range. God. And that was the first time I had listened to the podcast. I kind of get OCD. Like, I dive into things, I really dive into them. So I had actually tried not to go online and get all the answers right away. I was like, let me just figure out what this thing is per the book. But after that, I started listening that day. I listened to the fat and protein series that day, and it just got us got us going.

The School Preparation

Bethany (33:33)

Yeah. Like, I met a couple of the people, and and multiple people have told me, like, these people went and advocated at that school. Like, they are known for the work that they did in getting that school on the track. And I would say, like, I appreciate it a lot more, especially these last two weeks because our school nurse went on vacation, and we had the fill in nurse. And my daughter came home, and she was like, yeah. This lady's not in it day to day. You could just tell. She's not in diabetes the way our normal school nurse is.

Scott Benner (34:03)

She's just trying to get through this week and get her checked.

Bethany (34:05)

Oh, I'm telling you. My husband got the schools, like, put in lockdown last week because they freaked out. I mean, like, we've we've experienced what I'm sure other people do every day, and it's been super frustrating. But prior to that, I mean, seriously, we told the schools, you know, hey. Jordan was diagnosed this summer. This is a new thing in our life. Yeah. I had your five zero four plan, are in sixth grade five zero four plan, and it was like, all people in the school have to have this education. And, like, it was like checking off going down the list. It was all already done from this other family who had done all the advocacy work, and she said that she listened to the podcast. That was one of the first things that she asked me when I met her. Like, do you listen to the podcast?

Scott Benner (34:44)

Wow. I'm so happy. I don't really know another thing to say. I can't decide if this is giving me the energy to make a decades more, podcast or if I just wanna now ask all of you to just send me a dollar so I so I can so I can so I can retire.

Bethany (34:59)

I think you're gonna have to keep working.

Scott Benner (35:01)

I've done it, everyone. If you all just sent me $1, I could get out of this, I think. But, you have no idea. Like, I'd miss it in two seconds.

Closing

Scott Benner (1:14:31)

That's it.

Bethany (1:14:32)

I appreciate that.

Scott Benner (1:14:33)

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I appreciate you asking me even though I'm an egotistical lunatic who, is condescending to people all the time.

Bethany (1:14:40)

I mean, really, what was I thinking? But I

Scott Benner (1:14:42)

mean, you're an idiot, obviously.

Bethany (1:14:44)

Right. I'm the problem.

Scott Benner (1:14:46)

Did you hear he called her an idiot? She laughed. She felt a lot of pressure. Was very cringey.

Bethany (1:14:50)

Very demeaning.

Scott Benner (1:15:44)

Thank you. Yeah. Here we are. Thanks very much. Hold on one second for me.

Sponsors and Closing

Scott Benner (1:16:06)

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 Juice Box podcast was sponsored by US Med. Usmed.com/juicebox or call 888-721-1514. Get started today with US Med. Links in the show notes. Links at juiceboxpodcast.com. Okay. Well, here we are at the end of the episode. You're still with me? Thank you. I really do appreciate that. What else could you do for me? Why don't you tell a friend about the show or leave a five star review? Maybe you could make sure you're following or subscribe in your podcast app, go to YouTube and follow me, or Instagram, TikTok. Oh, gosh. Here's one. Make sure you're following the podcast in the private Facebook group as well as the public Facebook page. You don't wanna miss please, do you not know about the private group? You have to join the private group. As of this recording, it has 74,000 members. They're active talking about diabetes. Whatever you need to know, there's a conversation happening in there right now. And I'm there all the time. Tag me. I'll say hi.

Scott Benner (1:17:47)

Have you tried the small sip series? They're curated takeaways from the Juice Box podcast, voted on by listeners as the most helpful insights for managing their diabetes. These bite sized pieces of wisdom cover essential topics like insulin timing, carb management, and balancing highs and lows, making it easier for you to incorporate real life strategies into your daily routine. Dive deep, take a sip, and discover what our community finds most valuable on the journey to better diabetes management. For more information on small sips, go to juiceboxpodcast.com. Click on the word series in the menu. Have a podcast? Want it to sound fantastic? Wrongwayrecording.com.

Read Full Transcript

#1831 72 Days Later - Part 2

Kelly opens up about raising two teens diagnosed with Type 1 at age six. She discusses international living , multiple miscarriages , alarm fatigue , and managing different sibling personalities.

Proudly supported by

Key Takeaways

• The JBP AI Autoimmune Explorer tool revealed Zach's symptoms (back pain, cold intolerance, fatigue, inflammation) potentially link to Hashimoto's thyroiditis - and he's never had his thyroid checked despite his daughter's type 1 diagnosis.
• Don't obsess over Clarity reports daily during the honeymoon period - the data is too noisy to draw meaningful conclusions. Focus instead on understanding settings, timing, and food impacts.
• Perspective matters: Scott at 54 has roughly 1,368 weekends left, while Zach's daughter has decades ahead. There's no need to figure everything out in the first 72 days - time and experience are the only things that make diabetes management make sense.
• The Bernstein low-carb approach works for some, but the Benner philosophy advocates learning to bolus for any food rather than strict restriction. Whole foods are recommended, but rigid dietary rules aren't the only path to success.
• Back pain often has a significant stress component - "Healing Back Pain" by John Sarno explores how psychological stress manifests physically, and reading it helped Scott eliminate his chronic back pain.

Resources Mentioned

• Touched by Type One - Organization supporting people living with type 1 diabetes
• Tandem Mobi with Control IQ Plus - Smallest pump with auto bolus, multiple wear options, and iPhone control
• Eversense 365 - One-year wear CGM with unlimited data sharing
• JBP AI Autoimmune Explorer - Interactive tool to explore 32 autoimmune conditions and their overlapping symptoms
• "Healing Back Pain" by John Sarno - Book about how stress manifests as physical back pain
• Defining Diabetes Series - 70+ short episodes breaking down diabetes terminology with Jenny Smith

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Scott Benner (0:00)

Welcome back, friends, to another episode of the Juice Box podcast.

Zach (0:15)

Alright. Hi, Scott. Thanks for having me. My name is Zach. Upstate New York is the location. My daughter was diagnosed with type one diabetes exactly seventy two days ago.

Scott Benner (0:28)

This is part two of a two part episode. Go look at the title. If you don't recognize it, you haven't heard part one yet. It's probably the episode right before this in your podcast player. When I created the defining diabetes series, I pictured a dictionary in my mind to help you understand key terms that shape type one diabetes management. Along with Jenny Smith, who, of course, is an experienced diabetes educator, we break down concepts like basal, time and range, insulin on board, and much more. This series must have 70 short episodes in it. We have to take the jargon out of the jargon so that you can focus on what really matters, living confidently and staying healthy. You can't do these things if you don't know what they mean. Go get your diabetes defined. Juiceboxpodcast.com. Go up in the menu and click on series. Nothing you hear on the Juice Box podcast should be considered advice, medical or otherwise. Always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan.

Sponsor Messages

Scott Benner (1:30)

The episode you're about to listen to was sponsored by Touched by Type One. Go check them out right now on Facebook, Instagram, and, of course, at touchedbytype1.org. Check out that programs tab when you get to the website to see all the great things that they're doing for people living with type one diabetes. Touched bytype1.org. Today's episode is also sponsored by the Tandem Mobi system with Control IQ Plus technology. If you are looking for the only system with auto bolus, multiple wear options, and full control from your personal iPhone, you're looking for Tandem's newest pump and algorithm. Use my link to support the podcast, tandemdiabetes.com/juicebox. Check it out. The podcast is also sponsored today by the Eversense three sixty five, the one year wear 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 Eversense Now app? No limits. Eversense.

The JBP AI Autoimmune Explorer

Scott Benner (2:38)

And then you can hit the suggestion button, and it makes little lists for you. And then you can copy that or email it to yourself to go to the doctor with and say, hey. Listen. I've got these symptoms. It's worth asking, like, is this something? You can also kinda see where they overlap with other issues. It's certainly not a diagnostic tool. I'm not telling you you're gonna it's just kind of like a it's like an educational thing, but more kinda for fun to, like, just kinda click on it and see for fun. I'm the only one who would think this is fun, by the way. But, like, you know, like, where you can see where there's overlaps with different autoimmune issues.

Zach (3:07)

That sounds like a great tool. I can't wait to check it out.

Scott Benner (3:10)

Yeah. Yeah. So something like that you can take a look at. You know, you can type words in. You know, I'm tired, and it'll bring up stuff. But anyway, like, I just find that when people are in that situation, it's hard to know. You know what I mean? Like, who's gonna like, listen. Well, I'll do it with you for a second because you said you have a lot of things. Yeah. Do you have back pain? Yes.

Zach (3:30)

Well, I have, like, three collapsed discs in my back from playing too much golf. Yeah.

Scott Benner (3:34)

I'm gonna call it back pain. Do you have belly pain? No. Brain fog?

Zach (3:39)

I mean, I don't know what that is. I'm less focused than I used to be. I think it's because of the phone.

Scott Benner (3:43)

Butterfly rash?

Zach (3:44)

No. I don't know if

Scott Benner (3:45)

Chronic diarrhea?

Zach (3:47)

No. But I you know, like I said, I'm Ashkenazi. So

Scott Benner (3:52)

Cold intolerance?

Zach (3:54)

You know, that's changed, I think, when I hit I don't know. Let's call it 38. I'm much more cold in the house.

Scott Benner (4:00)

Okay. Do you have depression?

Zach (4:02)

No. Others in my family do, but I do not.

Scott Benner (4:05)

Dry eyes? Nope. Let's see. Do your eyes stick out? Nope. Fatigue?

Zach (4:13)

Yeah. I mean, again, I'm getting older. I'm not way fish.

Scott Benner (4:17)

Nope. Fever? Fever. Yes. It's not way fish. It's acts like I've put on a couple. Do you have a goiter? No. No? Has your hair started to gray?

Zach (4:27)

I mean, I'm 41, Scott. What do you want from me?

Scott Benner (4:30)

Hair graying? You have hair loss?

Zach (4:33)

You know, maybe the forehead's starting to kinda play a more prominent role in my life, but it's not significant.

Scott Benner (4:38)

Heat intolerance?

Zach (4:40)

It's not the same thing as

Scott Benner (4:43)

No. No. You get you get overheated easily.

Zach (4:45)

Oh, sorry. The opposite.

Scott Benner (4:46)

Yeah. No? Inflammation. Do you think you have inflammation?

Zach (4:51)

Well, I mean, to the extent that I have arthritis in my elbows or my hands or my ankles. Yes.

Scott Benner (4:59)

How about itchy? Are you ever itchy?

Zach (5:01)

I have dry skin. I live in Upstate New York.

Scott Benner (5:04)

Uh-huh. Just feeling Jaw pain, joint pain, or joint stiffness?

Zach (5:10)

No. But this is clearly the end of a pharmaceutical commercial.

Scott Benner (5:13)

It was done everything. You have low blood pressure? No. Malabsorption? Of what?

Scott Benner (5:20)

You think your body is not absorbing your nutrients correctly?

Zach (5:23)

Oh, I can't seem to raise my HDL, Scott. I have a like, familial hypercholesterolemia.

Scott Benner (5:30)

Oh, wow. Any numbness? Nope. Okay. Patchy hair loss? No. Photosensitivity?

Zach (5:38)

What does that mean? Like, have a seizure in the movies?

Scott Benner (5:40)

No. Like, does light bothers your eyes, gives you headaches, stuff like that? No. No? Do your fingers ever get cold at the end and can't warm up, turn blue? No. No? Any sexual dysfunction you're willing to share? No. No? Shaky skin issues? You said yes. Here's one. Smooth tongue. Spine stiffness. Tachycardia. I

Zach (6:04)

don't mean to laugh for those with smith tongues. I just never never heard that.

Scott Benner (6:08)

Tremors, vision loss, weakness, weight gain, weight loss, anything.

Zach (6:11)

My father is 75, but he has essential tremor.

Scott Benner (6:14)

That's your father. Weight gain, weight loss?

Zach (6:17)

No. I'm just always been slightly heavier than my doctor would like me to be.

Possible Hashimoto's Connection

Scott Benner (6:22)

Okay. So you have so four of the things that we mentioned for you might link back to Hashimoto's. So have you ever had your thyroid checked?

Zach (6:31)

Never. No. And so that's where we are, Skyler. Like, the whole family's gotta be checked. My younger daughter's gotta be checked, and we'll see where where it all shakes out. Mhmm. You know, some of the don't even bring this stuff up.

Scott Benner (6:45)

No. They're never going to.

Zach (6:46)

Columbia certainly has. They wanna test you for this and that. I mean, certainly for type one. It's interesting how the practices seem to vary.

Scott Benner (6:54)

Yeah. No. I mean, it's just anyway, like, I bring it up because I don't know if these things are gonna help anybody, but I just think it might be valuable for people to just kinda click around a little bit and see because, I mean, I made it because of how many people, you know, come on here all the time and talk about this kind of stuff happening in their life, and then you ask them if, you know, have they checked themselves? And they're just like, no. No. I don't have time for that or something like that. There's one woman I was talking to recently. I mean, she quite clearly has Hashimoto's. And she's like, well, the next time I'm at the doctor I'm like, no. Not the next time you're at the doctor. I was like, get off with me and call the doctor. I was like, I'm like, what do mean the next time you go to the doctor? Right. You know?

Zach (7:35)

Gotta be vigilant. Right?

Scott Benner (7:37)

Yeah, man. You gotta help yourself a little bit. Also, if your kid has an autoimmune issue, it's possible that you do too. Like, so are there any in your family line or your wife's family line that you're aware of?

Zach (7:47)

I know. That was that's always your first question, Scott. I'm surprised I didn't get it yet.

Scott Benner (7:51)

Well, seventy two days. I don't know what you know. No.

Zach (7:55)

I mean, we're not aware of any of that. This was totally out of left field.

Scott Benner (7:59)

No celiac in the family?

Zach (8:01)

No. Which is common among Ashkenazi Jews, but no.

Scott Benner (8:04)

That's why I asked because you brought that up. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And so wait. You're not related to one person who has hypothyroidism?

Zach (8:11)

That I'm aware of, Scott.

Scott Benner (8:12)

Yeah. And not that you're aware of. Yeah. You don't have, like, a sleepy aunt or anything like that?

Zach (8:19)

Nope. My aunts are wonderful.

Scott Benner (8:21)

Okay. Your aunts are they could be wonderful and sleepy, couldn't they?

Zach (8:25)

That's true.

Scott Benner (8:27)

Can you imagine if you were sleepy that makes you not wonderful? That'd be crazy. Zach, you're out of your mind.

Zach (8:32)

Sleepy people are quite wonderful.

Caregiver Burden Discussion

Scott Benner (8:34)

Yeah. Of course. Zach, in your note, you say caregiver burden, asking, like, how did I get through the first sixteen years of Arden? Yeah. Go ahead and ask your questions. I'll do my best for you.

Zach (8:46)

Well, I mean, the thing I always think of with you is sort of like you were able to dive in fully and get people to come to you to have these conversations. Certainly not learning anything from me, I didn't already know, but others, what I wouldn't give to be able to just work all day on my daughter's, you know, condition. But I I guess I'm maybe I'm far enough down a career path. I should probably try to stay focused on that, but it's hard. It's hard to have a child who has type one diabetes and still be a primary, you know, breadwinner for your family. So I gotta get back to that. Not meeting right now, but just in general. I have to regain my focus for my family's livelihood, while also continuing to do as good as we possibly can for Hannah.

Scott Benner (9:28)

Has your life been knocked off course the last couple of months?

Zach (9:32)

Oh, I mean, Scott, in the first week, I just you know, you grieve. Right? Yeah. And then you you try to kinda rally from there. It does feel like a constant report card. You know, you're always looking at the clarity reports and trying to do better, and then type one's always throwing you a curveball. But I think as much as any family, we're we're slowly trying to incorporate it into our life and continue our pursuit of bliss and not let it stop us from, you know, giving our kids a wonderful life. But it's that first week was you know, you just realize how big it is and how early it is in her life and how long we're gonna deal with it. You know? And you hear people talk about how hard puberty is and then how hard sort of emotional high school period is and how hard it is when they go to college, and that's all ahead of us. But, you know, hopefully, by then, we'll be more comfortable in some ways with the

Scott Benner (10:26)

Yeah. Probably not. I mean, no. No. Of course, you will. I was joking. But six months from now, you'll look back, you won't recognize this person. A year or two from now, you'll listen back to this and think, oh my god. I was out of my mind.

Zach (10:38)

I can't wait. Yeah.

Don't Obsess Over the Data

Scott Benner (10:39)

You know what I mean? Like and at the same time, everything you said is completely reasonable. It does throw your life into upheaval. Are paying way closer attention to something you didn't know anything about seventy three days ago. And, you know, you're working through trying to absorb information, apply it, is it working? I would tell you I'm gonna say kind of something backwards, but I think I wouldn't look at the clarity report every day. Yeah. I think maybe I would focus on settings, timing, understanding the impacts of the food. Yeah. Just try to get that together first. Also, she's actually having a honeymoon, to understand what's happening, there'll be takeaways from it long term, but, like, day to day I don't know how I mean this. Like, if you're wanting to drive a car in a straight line on a drag strip, and one day, the light turns green, you stomp on it, and you go. You're like, oh, it took us nine point five seconds to go a quarter of a mile. And then the next day, Godzilla steps on the track while you're doing it. You can't take the data from the Godzilla day and learn anything from it, really.

Zach (11:39)

Right.

Scott Benner (11:39)

Yeah. You know? So if you've got something just going crazy on you out of nowhere, I mean, that's just gonna cause more confusion than value, most likely.

Zach (11:49)

An illness.

Scott Benner (11:50)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you guys have been sick recently and all that other stuff. Right? So, like, once the honeymoon's over, then the takeaways should start piling up in a more meaningful way. I think that the value here if I could say one thing to you that I think would be incredibly valuable, is that she's three, and she's probably gonna live into her eighties. And you're 40, and you're probably gonna live into your eighties. So you've basically got, like, you know, the next twenty years to get her ready to graduate from college, and you'll still be around after that if she has any more questions. You're not gonna get this whole thing figured out in the next seventy two days. And that's difficult if because I've been where you've been, and I have felt what you're feeling. Yeah. And there is a mad rush to get it all figured out. And the truth is is that the only thing that's gonna make this make sense for you is time and experience. Yeah. That's it. You just gotta live with it every day, man, and not let it knock you down and take some takeaways. Look for repetitive stuff so that you can say that I know what's gonna happen is gonna happen. Like, I've seen this happen so many times. I know this is gonna happen next. Mhmm. Because you might hand me your daughter right now, and I might be able to keep her from having so many lows during the day in the exact same setup that she has right now. But the good news is that you'll be able to do that at some point as well.

Zach (13:16)

Look forward to that. Yeah. Appreciate the advice.

Scott Benner (13:19)

Does that make sense?

Zach (13:20)

It does. I mean, unfortunately, you undershot on the life expectancy for her. I had four grandparents. Right?

Scott Benner (13:27)

Go ahead.

How Many Weekends Do We Have Left?

Zach (13:27)

One of them was a chain smoker. Well, chain smoker. She smoked. She lived into her mid eighties. The rest of them were all 95. So you should have said a 100, Scott, if you wanted to make me feel good.

Scott Benner (13:41)

I just heard this thing the other day that really bummed me out. But now I don't remember the number, so I'm just gonna like, I'm gonna plop it back in here because I've got this window open still. But I was listening to somebody tell me at my age how many more weekends I have left.

Zach (13:56)

Oh, yeah. I've seen these charts.

Scott Benner (13:58)

And it wasn't a big number, Zach. I gotta tell you. Yeah. And Yeah. And then I saw it on a Sunday afternoon. So the actuarial breakdown for me is I'm a man at 54. My statistical life expectancy is that I roughly have twenty six more years left.

Zach (14:32)

Nah. You'll do better than that, Scott. You got the GLP ones now.

Scott Benner (14:36)

Well, I'll tell it I got a GLP in a second, see what it says. But my son's 26. Yeah. That entire time felt like it went by in a split second. Yeah. And I was younger when it happened. So what you're telling me is I'm gonna blink six more times and drop dead. Is that what this is gonna be? You know what I mean? Anyway Scott,

Zach (14:53)

it's even worse because your baseball is not gonna be as good as your son's for those twenty six years.

Scott Benner (14:57)

No. Exactly. So how many more weekends do I have left? 1,544.

Zach (15:03)

Gotta make them count, Scott.

Scott Benner (15:05)

How am I gonna do that? I gotta go grocery shopping.

Zach (15:07)

Arden's not home anymore, is she? What are you what are you so worried about the grocery store?

Scott Benner (15:12)

She came back, and she's going to school from here right now. She's got another not quite a year of school left that she'll be going to grad school. So Nice.

Zach (15:20)

Congrats to her.

Scott Benner (15:21)

Yeah. By the way, that's very nice. Gemini is trying to be kind to me. It says seeing a finite number between thirteen hundred and fifteen hundred, which I who said 1,300? Like, wait. Then I realized that number's for a woman my age. A man my age, it's thirteen sixty eight.

Zach (15:38)

Yeah.

Scott Benner (15:39)

It says I could see it could be a bit jarring. Right. Thank you, Gemini. It was a bit jarring.

Zach (15:47)

Yeah. The AI is trying to be a therapist. Right?

Scott Benner (15:50)

No. But but but seriously, like, that, you should reverse engineer what I just said. You have so much time, you know, just around the diabetes piece that the person you are today trying to understand what a 14 year old's life is gonna look like with diabetes and an 18 year old's life and somebody in college and what happens when she goes to get married. Like Yeah. It's really another version of, like you know, I tell my wife all the time that worry is a waste of imagination. She does not listen. But, to like, right now, you are worried about things. With such incomplete data, you have no idea what it is you should be worried about or not worried about. Right. It would be a shame if you spent this time with your young family, bringing your hands over something that never came true. That you never even needed to think about it for. So I tell you, man, it's timing amount. Understand the impact of your food. Don't stare at a high blood sugar. It's pretty much it. You know what I mean? And then you do that at the different parts of your life and things work out. And a six nine a one c, seventy two days after diagnosis with a three year old is absolutely brilliant.

Zach (17:00)

Thank you, Scott. Yeah. I appreciate it.

Scott Benner (17:02)

Yeah. You're doing well.

Zach (17:03)

And you deserve some credit for that. You know?

Scott Benner (17:05)

I deserve all the credit for it, Zach, but I don't like to bring it up. It makes me sound you know what I mean? I listen. I gotta tell you something. There's a family friend who I've helped with some stuff. Right? And their situation is so much better now. They were on the phone last night explaining it to my wife, and my wife hangs up the phone, and she looks at me and I went, I did that. I fixed that whole thing for them.

Zach (17:30)

And my wife Well, I don't mind you saying it. You don't have to be modest here. You're doing big things in this space. Thank you, Zach.

Scott Benner (17:36)

I was like, that was me. I fixed all that for them. And then and my wife makes that face at me, and I laugh because I'm joking, but I'm not. And I said, this is why it's important for me to have a podcast. I can't be limited to just helping one person at a time.

Zach (17:50)

I mean, I can't believe I'm speaking to you, Scott. I mean, I emailed you the second day in the hospital. I'm not expecting a response, here I am. So it's pretty cool.

Scott Benner (17:57)

No, man. I like I don't get your perspective that often. The just a few days into it perspective. Yeah. So I like to have that sometimes. I don't want too much of it because then the podcast is just a bunch of people going, I don't know what's happening. I'm like, yeah.

Zach (18:12)

I'm spinning out of control.

Mid-Episode Sponsor Break

Scott Benner (18:14)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Episode is sponsored by Tandem Diabetes Care. And today, I'm gonna tell you about Tandem's newest pumping 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, tandemdiabetes.com/juicebox. This is going to help you to get started with Tandem's 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 thirty minutes ahead, and it adjusts insulin accordingly. You can wear the Tandem Mobi 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, tandemdiabetes.com/juicebox, to check out your benefits and get started today.

Scott Benner (19:18)

When you think of a CGM and all the good that it brings in your life, is the first thing you think about, I love that I have to change it all the time? I love the warm up period every time I have to change it? I love that when I bump into a door frame, sometimes it gets ripped off. I love that the adhesive kinda gets mushy sometimes when I sweat and falls off. No. These are not the things that you love about a CGM. Today's episode of the Juice Box podcast is sponsored by the Eversense three sixty five, the only CGM that you only have to put on once a year, and the only CGM that won't give you any of those problems. The Eversense three sixty five is the only one year CGM designed to minimize device frustration. It has exceptional accuracy for one year with almost no false alarms from compression lows while you're sleeping. You can manage your diabetes instead of your CGM with the Eversense three sixty five. Learn more and get started today at eversensecgm.com/juicebox. One year, one CGM.

Predictors of Success

Scott Benner (20:19)

Scott, I'm thinking of leaving my family and going to I

Zach (20:23)

didn't say that. You did.

Scott Benner (20:25)

Then I'm going to the Everglades. I'm gonna hunt snakes until one of them gets me. I'm done. I'm out. You imagine.

Zach (20:32)

I might discover the cure for type one in the venom.

Scott Benner (20:35)

In that park, you might. There's something going on in there. But, no, seriously, like, you're gonna be fine. Like, I'll tell you right now, predictors of success for me, one of them is a level of interest in this whole thing. You have that. You know what I mean? Like, I think just being interested and paying attention is a predictor of success in type one diabetes, probably in everything. But people who have your level of interest usually end up doing pretty well.

Zach (21:02)

The funny part is, Scott, I spoke to a mom early on and she said, you know, my husband's really analytical, and I'm kind of a little more of a feel in terms of the ball of saying. And, you know, we're kind of ying and yang it, and we're doing a great job. And I was like, okay. Whatever. Now here I am seventy two days later, you know, spinning out of control, reading everything. You know, my wife is just kinda winging it, and who's a better baller, sir? That would be my wife Michelle.

Scott Benner (21:26)

It's her. Yeah. She feels the art. Right?

Zach (21:28)

Yeah.

Scott Benner (21:28)

There's a little bit of an art to it. Yep. You know what they say? Like, let go. What if you hold on too tightly, it slips away? What is that about there's something about holding on to something? I don't really Something. I didn't go to college.

Zach (21:39)

Something. Yeah.

Scott Benner (21:40)

Yeah, Zach. I don't know. Just don't hold on too tight. It's gonna be okay. You got fast acting sugar in the house and some glucagon. I think you'll be alright.

Zach (21:49)

Blow gummies. Can't, recommend him enough.

Pump Changes with a Toddler

Scott Benner (21:52)

How is she with the pokes and the devices and stuff like that?

Zach (21:56)

What's a word that's worse than terrible?

Scott Benner (21:59)

Does she scream while it's happening?

Zach (22:01)

She's two and a half, Scott. You know, the funny thing is, like, now she's at the point where, you know, we got the good tip early on of, like, you know, get all these stickers and stuff and get them excited about designing it. Right? So we did all that. And now she gets excited, and she's like, I wanna change my robot. We call it robots. Right? But then when you actually start, you know, you spray the adhesive remover and you're getting rid then the screaming begins.

Scott Benner (22:22)

She starts going, wait a minute. Yeah. This sticker thing is not gonna help me with the next part. Right. I love the idea that a three year old can be like, wait a second. Probably forgot about this part. No. I mean, listen. I don't know what to tell you about it all. It sucks. And, you know, people are like, well, how am I gonna stop it from having a detrimental effect on my kid later? I'm like, I don't know that you can, but, you know, there's a much more detrimental effect not taking your insulin.

Zach (22:50)

There you go.

Scott Benner (22:51)

I think a big part of the first couple years is regulating yourself and your expectations for life. Because there's no doubt that, again, like, three months ago, you were like, oh, I have a young family. You know, I've got this little girl. I've got another baby that just got here. This is all great. We're doing terrific. I mean, I could paint you a picture right now, Arden's second birthday, the backyard of our house. We hired a guy to bring a pony. Mhmm. He put the kids on ponies and was, like, walking them in circles, ruining the grass. Didn't even care. Couldn't have possibly cared less walking the ponies in a circle. Just a beautiful experience. Like, I had a son who was maybe god. What was that? 2004. He was only about four years old. Like, 2006. He was six. She was two. There's a pony in my yard. Like, you know what I mean? I think we had the zoo bring animals. I think there was, a snake and a an eagle. I'm not even making that up.

Scott Benner (23:50)

Wow. Yeah. It was like a petting zoo back there.

Zach (23:52)

You're making me feel bad. I got a third birthday party to plan here.

Scott Benner (23:56)

We just bought the house. We had a yard finally. Like, we were doing this whole this summertime Arden. We even made Arden on purpose so she'd be born in the summer so we could have a summertime birthday party. And, like, I'm not even kidding you.

Zach (24:07)

Like, as a planners.

Scott Benner (24:08)

We've only planned two things in our life. One of them was getting pregnant in October so that Arden could have a birthday party in our backyard. And then we get the whole thing, and there it is. And I have to tell you, like, I stood back for a second that day, and I thought, oh, man. I did it. Right. I grew up so broken, like, in a family that didn't have any of this. I was like, I put the whole thing together in my mid twenties. Like, I really I did it. You know? Yeah. And, like, a couple weeks later, we're sitting in that hospital. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then I don't know. It takes as much time as it takes for you to regulate yourself and understand that, like, nothing in life is promised and that, you know, it was never gonna go exactly the way you thought. It just these things seem really big. Yeah. But the sooner you realize that, like, these are the cards and you still play. And you don't play differently, you gotta play the same way that you were going to before this happened. And that's when it all melts away, and it doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

Zach (25:06)

I think we're getting closer.

Scott Benner (25:07)

Yeah. Well, hell, you got plenty of time. You just started. So you're still on your first set of tires in this race. You know what I mean?

Zach (25:14)

That's right.

Bernstein versus Benner

Scott Benner (25:15)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a note in here for you about like, you just said, at the end, you wrote Bernstein versus Benner. What did you mean by that when you wrote that down?

Zach (25:25)

Well, you brought it up before in a way. You were talking about why are you talking about low carb. And I think that that there's the happy medium. Right? So when you think about your chicken nugget, which I I forget if this was in bold beginnings or what, where you talked about the chicken nuggets. It's a perfect example because that's where I'm at in diet, in life with a young kid. Right? The dinosaur chicken nuggets. Right? Is that, you know, I think the the reasonable middle ground is probably where we land, which is that you try to offer some low carb options or maybe in between meals do that. But part of that is just I think you don't wanna keep feed the kids all white flour and sugar, which a lot of, you know, young kids end up eating. They eat a lot of goldfish. They eat Annie's gummies or whatever. So Bernstein, I'm sure most of your audience will know, was a guy who basically I don't wanna oversimplify it. I haven't read the book. But he he was diagnosed midlife, then became a doctor, then wrote a book. He lived into his nineties, and he advocated for his book was called the diabetes solution. And what was the solution? It was don't eat carbs. I mean, basically.

Scott Benner (26:31)

It worked really well for him. Yeah. We're As I can tell.

Zach (26:34)

You know? But I think your podcast is a little bit more about balance. Right? I don't think you come out and advocate for low carb. You advocate for learning how to bolus. That's why I described it that way, I think. Yeah. I don't I don't wanna put words in your mouth or his.

Scott Benner (26:48)

No. I mean, listen. I've never read the man's book either, but, like, he lived a hell of a long time. Mhmm. You know, the last handful of years, he was in his eighties, if I'm not mistaken.

Zach (26:58)

Right. 90. I think he got to 90.

Scott Benner (27:00)

90. That's amazing. Like, you know, and for having diabetes for as long as he did. Right. You know, and starting when he started

Zach (27:08)

Without technology. Right.

Scott Benner (27:09)

Yeah. His longevity is astounding. And it's hard to argue. Right? Like, the fewer carbs you take in, the less insulin you're gonna need, the less insulin you use, the less chance you're gonna have at, like, Lowe's. You know, the carbs aren't gonna make high blood sugar. I I think all that makes a thousand percent sense.

Zach (27:25)

For sure. But it can increase burden too, right, of just being in the world.

Scott Benner (27:29)

Yeah. Maybe. Like, I don't know. Like, I don't think it's important to assign, like, what I think about it. What I think is that there are a lot of people out in the world, they have a lot of personalities and a lot of experiences and a lot of access to money or not access to it and health care and other so many differences in people's lives. I thought it would be stupid for me to jump on this podcast and pick a thing and say, do this just like this. Yeah. Because I just don't think you reach that many people that way. And so I thought I had the biggest possibility of reaching the most people by saying, look, I think if you understand how the insulin works and you understand how food impacts you, that you can make decisions that will meaningfully keep your blood sugar more stable. Then then you go ahead and apply that idea to the way you live because I'm not in charge of how you live and I certainly can't change your mind about what you eat. Like, do I think you should be eating a ton of white flour and being at fast food restaurants? And I don't think you should do that at all. But I also think if I said that to you, you'd be like, oh, well, sure. It's easy for you to say, asshole, because you've got your own set of circumstances. I'm trying to pass on to people what I've learned in a way that will be valuable for them, not in a way that is either, like, celebratory because they do it that way or punitive because they don't. I'm just gonna tell you, like, this is what works for me, and I think it could work for you too. Give it a shot if you want to, if you don't want to. I don't wanna say I couldn't care less, but I couldn't care less. Like, do whatever you wanna do. Yeah. You know what I mean? But I think that if you come out and say, eat like this. This is the right way. You'll capture the people who agree with you.

Zach (29:07)

Right.

Scott Benner (29:07)

And that's it. But you're not gonna talk anyone else into it. Like, nobody who isn't gonna eat low carb is gonna hear that story. If doctor Bernstein rose from the grave right now and retold his story, people who aren't gonna eat low carb wouldn't go, oh, okay. I'll do it. They'll just go, well, that's nice. I'm glad it worked for you, and I'm not up for it.

Zach (29:24)

Well, the difference is we're making decisions for somebody else right now.

Scott Benner (29:28)

Right? Yeah.

Zach (29:28)

Just just two and a half.

Scott Benner (29:29)

Right. Yeah. I mean, you are a new father. Like, you're in the middle of deciding how you're gonna talk to your kids about food and what you're gonna bring into the house and what's gonna be available and what's not going to be. You hear Jenny talk about it sometimes. Like, her kids don't get food like that. They don't even know it exists, and they don't care. They're fine, but it works for them. She could just as easily have put that into place for kids who were like, hey, lady. I want a Zag Nut bar right now, and I'm gonna scream until I get one. Like, I don't know. She doesn't know either. Like, is it nature? Is it nurture? I'm assuming it's a little of both. You know, how she got to there, how she's wired, how her brain works around it. Like, it's not as easy as just saying I'm gonna do this thing now. Because if that was the case, then I would get on my rowing machine every day and not just when I force myself to do it. Yeah. You know, like, I'm just not wired like that. Mhmm. Could I fix that? I probably could change that for myself, but I don't know how to do that. Or if I want to, to be perfectly honest, like, I don't know, man.

Scott Benner (30:31)

Know, You I saw a post popped up in front of me recently. I would definitely never say anybody's name. But it's somebody who eats incredibly low carb and has really nice success with it. And, you know, it's it's celebratory post as it absolutely should be. And there's about, I don't know, 700 likes on it. And it would be easy to look at that and say, oh my god. Look. 700 people agree with that. That's all the people. But it's not. My group is full of people who eat the way they eat and, you know, there are people who support them doing that. And I just don't understand, I guess, the desire to make somebody feel badly if they don't do what you do. And I'm not even saying anybody does that. Like, I'm just saying, like, you're gonna figure your way through this, Zach, and it's not up to me how you get through it. I don't even know that it's up to you how you get through it. Like, sometimes I just think it's life and things you run into, things that make sense to you or don't, amount of effort you have available at the end of the day to, you know, make a chicken nugget yourself versus open up the frozen bag of whatever the hell those dinosaurs are. Pretty sure they're not chicken. But, you know and I'm, you know I don't know. Like, I don't want you to feel bad about it. I want you to do as well as you can do. Yeah. And be happy and etcetera. Like, I don't know. Like, I might lose a 100 of those weekends because around Easter, I really do like eating a couple of stale Peeps. You know? Like, I don't know. But, like, you know, when I'm 84 and I can't see my hand in front of my face, I might think, oh, I should've eaten more of those Peeps. I could've got out of here sooner. So, like, I don't I don't know how life's gonna go, man. Nobody does. You know? So doctor Bernstein found something that worked great for him, and it works great for the people he found that agree with him and who jive with that idea. I think that's awesome. I really do. Like, whatever works for you is what I think is awesome. Yeah. Right. No. That was a lot of talking. I'm sorry.

Zach (32:28)

That's okay. Yeah. I mean, one thing it makes me think is, like, there's this question of people say the less insulin you use, the less chance you have a bad outcomes. Another way of saying the healthier you eat, the healthier you'll be. Right? Because, essentially, if, you know, you're using less insulin, you're probably eating it healthier.

Scott Benner (32:46)

Mhmm.

Zach (32:46)

Now there may be some high fat, you know, Atkinsey things that people have to say about the cardiovascular system. But is it the insulin, or is it just like a bad diet? It's a bad diet. I'm still trying to figure that out too. Don't know what the reality is there. But you're right. I mean, at the end of the day, there's trade offs on, like, mental health and disease burden and all of that. So I definitely hear what you're saying.

Whole Foods Philosophy

Scott Benner (33:06)

Yeah. And if you want the opinion of somebody that barely got through high school, didn't go through college, and has absolutely no training, I think that you should eat whole foods as much as you can.

Zach (33:15)

Right. Yeah. The the whole state of the outside of the grocery store.

Scott Benner (33:19)

Yeah. That makes sense to me. Right? Like, I've said it a number of ways in the podcast. Like, when I was struggling with my health and my weight and all that stuff, I didn't know what I was doing. I say this all the time. Happy to tell you again. Grew up like a trash person. You know, like, nobody made good food for me. Nobody even understood what good food was. And as an adult, when I was like, oh, I have these kids, and I don't want them to be in my situation.

Zach (33:41)

Mhmm.

Scott Benner (33:41)

I don't know what to do. So I would just follow people around the grocery store that look healthy. I'd be like, what are they buying? It doesn't take long for you to follow them around to realize they don't go up the potato chip aisle.

Zach (33:53)

Right.

Scott Benner (33:54)

Like, that's just pretty simple. All those healthy looking people that I saw in the grocery store, I look in their cart, there's no potato chips in their cart. Yeah. I don't see soda in their cart. They make decisions like that, or maybe they're not even decisions. Maybe it's just how they were brought up or whatever. And I say to myself, okay. Well, I'll try to avoid that stuff for my kids. And I'll tell you right now, my son all the time sits down with a glass of water, and I'm so proud every time I see him do it because I wouldn't drink water if you paid me. I hate it. Yeah. I don't even know why. Like, it it tastes like water. I think that's the worst part. But at the same time, I'm fine with it. It's just when I sit down, like, in a relaxing situation, it would not occur to me to do it, but my kids do it all the time. You know? They eat beans and chicken and the stuff that I basically told them to eat when they were little. I was in charge of telling them that. Just the way I grew up eating hamburger helper and all that garbage my mom and dad gave me. But my parents were broke, and it's probably the best they could do, but it still informed how I ate. And so, you know, I had more luck guiding my children than I did changing for myself, to be perfectly honest. You know? Because I just it felt that important at the time. There's still places it slips through the cracks. Like, my wife definitely has, like, a make sure there's snacks around the house so everybody feels loved mentality.

Zach (35:18)

Mhmm.

Scott Benner (35:18)

And that's psychological. That's got nothing to do with food. You know what I mean? So, like, I don't know, man. Like, you got little kids. Like, you the world's your oyster right now. You'd probably get them to do whatever you want.

Zach (35:33)

You're making it sound too easy.

Scott Benner (35:34)

That kid's gonna go to college and eat pizza for goddamn sure. I don't care what you feed her.

Zach (35:38)

Oh my god. Some of those episodes where you talked about the food is of restaurant quality. As Art is discovering the cafeteria. That was insightful for me, just the way you described that.

Scott Benner (35:49)

Yeah. College food is trash.

Zach (35:51)

Well, just the idea that you don't know what's going in at the restaurant, and a bowl of this or a bowl of that is not the same in your house or at the restaurant. Yeah. And that's a general philosophy that you can it helps you learn about what goes into a dish and what that means, and slowly you learn why the goldfish are so hard to bolus for.

Scott Benner (36:09)

Mhmm.

Zach (36:09)

I mean, you learn something about health in general, I think, through diabetes.

Scott Benner (36:13)

You leave the chilies after having a chicken finger and a fry, and you're like, I gotta go to the bathroom. I got it right now. Out of the way. Is it the grease in the fryer? Is it the grated chicken? Is it what's in the breading? Is it like I don't know. No idea. I don't mean to pick on chilies either. I hear it's a celebration of food. But, like, you know, like, that kind of stuff. Like, there's so much fat and sugar and salt and everything so that, like, the food doesn't even have to be good. Like, those jojas it up so much for you. You'll leave there. You're like, this was awesome.

Scott Benner (36:43)

Mhmm. I see people do that all the time. There's a chain restaurant that sells steaks.

Zach (36:47)

Texas Roadhouse?

Scott Benner (36:49)

That's the one. You couldn't drag me in there if you chained me to a car and pulled me in there.

Zach (36:53)

It's the most successful restaurant in America. Right?

Scott Benner (36:56)

I swear to you, I've had a meal there maybe twice in my life, and each time I've left, I felt like I got a a telegram from my body. It's gone beep beep beep beep beep beep. What it's saying is, like, please don't ever do that again.

Zach (37:09)

A lot of butter.

Scott Benner (37:09)

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that's just it. Like, a lot of fat or whatever. Like, it's possible you don't even know if it's a good steak. It's just so drenched in whatever that it hits all your pleasure centers, and you go for right on. This was awesome. So I don't know, man. Like, good luck to you. You're gonna have more kids. May I suggest not?

Zach (37:28)

I don't I think we're done. I mean, look.

Scott Benner (37:35)

You're not on a roll, if you know what I mean. Like

Zach (37:38)

I might fall over if we have another one. It's a lot of work, man.

Back Pain and Stress

Scott Benner (37:41)

My last question for you is your back. What's wrong with your back?

Zach (37:45)

I worked at a driving range in high school, and I have a pretty high swing speed. And if you know anything about most driving ranges, they have a sort of a little rubber mat with, like, fake grass on it, and then underneath that's concrete pad.

Scott Benner (37:57)

Mhmm.

Zach (37:58)

So imagine, you know, you're working the cash register, but when it's not that busy, you're hitting, like, 300 golf balls a day as your spine is developing from a adolescent into an adult, you know, from the ages of 14 to 18. While the impact of a shaft going a 100 miles an hour plus into a thin rubber mat and concrete is intense, I guess, I'll say. I think that's probably what caused my disc to herniate at quite a young age. And, you know, what happens when you herniate a disc is the sort of gelatinous substance inside of it squeezes out, presses on your nerve, causes all kind of leg pain and numbness. And then over time, that gelatinous stuff just kind of dries up and goes away, and your vertebrae are essentially sitting on top of each other. That's called degenerative disc disease.

Scott Benner (38:43)

Mhmm.

Zach (38:44)

So I have, like, three levels that are basically collapsed like that at this point, but I still play golf.

Scott Benner (38:49)

Has it been worse over the last few months?

Zach (38:52)

Yeah. It kinda ratcheted up a little bit, you know, but at wintertime plus diabetes stress didn't help. Carrying around a baby, carrying around a bowling ball. You know?

Scott Benner (39:01)

I don't say a lot of hippie stuff on the podcast. Yeah. But here you go. Okay. Healing Back Pain by John Sarno. It's a book? Yeah. Just read it. Okay. I haven't heard of that one. It fundamentally changed my life. Not kidding. Yeah. But it's more about, like, stress and how it manifests in your back sometimes.

Zach (39:24)

Is the stress coming through the microphone, Scott?

Scott Benner (39:26)

No. I know you, Zach. Don't worry. I've been you and I know you and I know where we're going here. I'm gonna tell you, like, when I read that book and it made sense to me, I really did alleviate a lot of my back pain. And I think it was little stats in there, like, prior to I'm gonna get all this wrong, but, like, prior to World War two, the instance of men complaining about back pain was, like, nonexistent. Like, so when we were all out there busy, you know, fighting Jerry or whatever was going on

Zach (39:56)

For our lives, guys.

Scott Benner (39:57)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody was worried if their back hurt. And then you brought them home and gave them a quarter of an acre and some grass and free time, and people were suddenly more aware of themselves and their stress build up. And another way he says it is that if you went to work and had a horrible day at work and came home with a headache, you wouldn't come home and tell people your brain is broken. But if you go to work or say your kid's diagnosed with type one diabetes and your back starts hurting, you tell people right now, I've slipped this. I have a bad back. And he said if you I forget what the number is. If you take, like, a thousand adults who've never complained of back pain and give them an MRI, a surprising number of them have the disc stuff that you were talking about. Yeah. It was just I don't know. Those things made sense to me in the time. I mean, I can save you the $20 if you want, although I think it's worth reading.

Zach (40:49)

How many ohms do I have to say to get rid of this?

Scott Benner (40:51)

Well, what I used to say quietly in my own mind was my back's not broken. I'm okay. Alright. Yeah. And then it just kinda got better. Then the rest of it was losing weight. I lost weight and that's it. My back I feel badly saying this because the listeners about five years ago bought me the chair I'm sitting in because my back hurts so badly. Oh, wow. I complained about it on the podcast one time, and I decided, like, I'll spend more money on a chair. And I didn't know what to do, and they were expensive. So I went online. I was like, hey, guys. Can you tell me the difference between these chairs? Does anybody use these? And before I knew it, I woke up the next day, there was, like, $2,500 people had sent me to buy a chair with, like, in total.

Zach (41:30)

Oh my god.

Scott Benner (41:30)

And so I sit in a really great steel case chair. It's awesome, by the way. But to all those people who did that, my back doesn't hurt anymore. It's not because of the chair, so I'm so sorry. But I do appreciate the chair still. It's the only thing I've ever taken from people is my chair, and I just losing the weight made my back not hurt anymore.

GLP-1 Medications

Zach (41:49)

Yeah. Yeah. I actually it's funny. Leading up to the diabetes the year before, had been on GLP ones, which didn't work well for me, but I won't go into that tangent. And my wife, because of the rounds of IVF to conceive our daughters, had been, you know, for the first time, injecting herself with various things.

Scott Benner (42:08)

Yeah.

Zach (42:09)

That's just part of what that process is. So the one thing we did have coming into diabetes is experience with needles. Mhmm. Mhmm. So it was

Scott Benner (42:18)

Wait. Listen. You're already in the ninety minute range. So why didn't GLP work for you?

Zach (42:22)

Here's what I found. Because I had less appetite, I eventually would get hungry at, like, 03:00.

Scott Benner (42:29)

Mhmm.

Zach (42:30)

And then I would just eat whatever crap was around the house. And my wife was pregnant, so there was a lot of crap around the house.

Scott Benner (42:35)

If you would have just eaten chicken in that moment, Zach, you would have lost weight.

Zach (42:39)

Yeah. It's like trying to get my daughter to eat chicken right now.

Scott Benner (42:41)

What dose were you up to?

Zach (42:44)

Two and a half. Like a child

Scott Benner (42:46)

of what? Ozempic?

Zach (42:48)

Generic semaglutide. I was going through that company, Roe, so it's probably coming from god knows where. You know what happened with all that. Right? So during COVID, there was a shortage of supply due to supply chain issues. Yeah. And so they changed the law, and all these companies just started making generic semaglutide, which is Ozempic. Yeah.

Scott Benner (43:08)

Yeah. Yeah.

Zach (43:09)

And so and it was way less expensive.

Scott Benner (43:11)

Do you have weight to lose still?

Zach (43:14)

Yeah. You know, it's funny. So I'm, like, six two. Mhmm. If I stepped on a scale right now, I'd probably say, like, two fifty five or something. If you looked at me because I'm taller, I don't think most people would say, like, I was obviously obese, but I'm overweight for sure.

Scott Benner (43:28)

Yeah. Zach, I'm gonna tell you right now, a little zepbound

Zach (43:32)

I've heard it's better.

Scott Benner (43:33)

40 pounds off you in the next year. Bet your back doesn't hurt as much anymore. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah.

Scott Benner (43:39)

Oh, man. Reminds me today's my day to inject. I'm so happy now. I just realized I'm gonna be alive for another week.

Zach (43:45)

One more weekend.

Scott Benner (43:46)

One more weekend? Yeah. 1,300. Are you kidding me? What in the hell, Zach? Oh my god. Alright. Is there anything that we didn't talk about that we should have? Anything that you want to bring up that I I talked around and wouldn't let you get to?

Zach (44:00)

No. This was great. I hope you can weave together, something that's of interest to the listeners and just thanks again for doing what you do and then for allowing me to be a part of it.

Scott Benner (44:09)

Oh, I was like, it's my pleasure. But please, if you think there's any weaving that goes on, Rob's gonna blur out where you said, said, two times I just said, here plus the one more, then people are getting it. We're gonna stick some ads on it, and it's gonna go up on the Internet.

Zach (44:23)

Very good. Sounds good to me.

Scott Benner (44:25)

We don't chop up the conversations. We let them happen. Thank you very much, man. It's really great. Hold on one second for me. Okay? Yep.

Closing and Sponsors

Scott Benner (44:38)

Touched by Type one sponsored this episode of the Juice Box podcast. Check them out at touchedbytype1.org on Instagram and Facebook. Give them a follow. Go check out what they're doing. They are helping people with type one diabetes in ways you just can't imagine. Are you tired of getting a rash from your CGM adhesive? Give the Eversense three sixty five a try. Eversense c g m dot com slash juice box. Beautiful silicone that they use. It changes every day. Keeps it fresh. Not only that, you only have to change the sensor once a year. So, I mean, that's better.

Scott Benner (45:16)

Today's episode of the Juice Box podcast was sponsored by the new Tandem Mobi system and Control IQ Plus technology. Learn more and get started today at tandemdiabetes.com/juicebox. Check it out. Okay. Well, here we are at the end of the episode. You're still with me? Thank you. I really do appreciate that. What else could you do for me? Why don't you tell a friend about the show or leave a five star review? Maybe you could make sure you're following or subscribe in your podcast app, go to YouTube and follow me or Instagram, TikTok. Oh, gosh. Here's one. Make sure you're following the podcast in the private Facebook group as well as the public Facebook page. You don't wanna miss please, do you not know about the private group? You have to join the private group. As of this recording, it has 74,000 members. They're active talking about diabetes. Whatever you need to know, there's a conversation happening in there right now. And I'm there all the time. Tag me. I'll say hi. Hey. Do you need support? I have some stuff for you.

Scott Benner (46:21)

It's all free. Juiceboxpodcast.com. Click on support in the menu. Let's see what you get there. A one c and blood glucose calculator. People love that. That's actually, I think, the most popular page on the website some months. A list of great endocrinologists from listeners. That's from all over the country. There's a link to the private Facebook group, to the Circle community, and, we have a a fantastic thing there, American Sign Language. There's a great sign language interpreter who did the entire Bold Beginnings series in ASL. So if you know anybody who would benefit from that, please send them that way. Just go to juiceboxpodcast.com and click on support. While you're there, check out the guides like the pre bolusing guide, fat and protein insulin calculator, oh gosh, thyroid, GLP, caregiver burnout. You should go to the website. Click around a little bit on those menus. It really there's a lot more there than you think. If you have a podcast and you need a fantastic editor, you want Rob from Wrong Way Recording. Listen. Truth be told, I'm, like, 20% smarter when Rob edits me. He takes out all the, like, gaps of time and when I go, and stuff like that. And it just I don't know, man. Like, I listen back and I'm like, why do I sound smarter? And then I remember because I did one smart thing. I hired Rob at wrongwayrecording.com.

Read Full Transcript

#1830 72 Days Later - Part 1

Kelly opens up about raising two teens diagnosed with Type 1 at age six. She discusses international living , multiple miscarriages , alarm fatigue , and managing different sibling personalities.

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Key Takeaways

• Early Symptom Awareness: Recognizing signs like excessive urination (saturated diapers) and extreme thirst is critical for a timely diagnosis, especially in toddlers.
• AI as a Medical Tool: Utilizing tools like ChatGPT can help parents synthesize symptoms and seek urgent care, though it requires verification by medical professionals.
• Rapid Tech Adoption: Moving quickly to CGM (Dexcom G7) and Automated Insulin Delivery (Omnipod 5) can lead to impressive initial outcomes, such as a GMI of 6.9 within the first 100 days.
• Dynamic Honeymoon Phase: Physical activity levels, such as starting daycare, can dramatically shift insulin needs and cause unpredictable blood sugar drops in newly diagnosed children.
• The "Why" of Autoimmunity: Statistical data shows a significant surge in autoimmune conditions over the last 40 years, likely driven by modern environmental and lifestyle factors rather than genetics alone.

Resources Mentioned

• Able Now: ablenow.com
• Dexcom G7: dexcom.com/juicebox
• Omnipod 5: omnipod.com/juicebox
• Integrated Diabetes Services: integrateddiabetes.com
• Juicebox Podcast Facebook Group: Join the Community
• Wrong Way Recording: wrongwayrecording.com

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Introduction and New Beginnings

Scott Benner (0:00) Welcome back, friends. You are listening to the Juice Box podcast.

Zach (0:14) Alright. Hi, Scott. Thanks for having me. My name is Zach. Upstate New York is the location. My daughter was diagnosed with type one diabetes exactly seventy two days ago.

Scott Benner (0:27) If your loved one is newly diagnosed with type one diabetes and you're seeking a clear practical perspective, check out the bold beginnings series on the juice box podcast. It's hosted by myself and Jenny Smith, an experienced diabetes educator with over thirty five years of personal insight into type one. Our series cuts through the medical jargon and delivers straightforward answers to your most pressing questions. You'll gain insight from real patients and caregivers and find practical advice to help you confidently navigate life with type one. You can start your journey informed and empowered with the Juice Box podcast.

Scott Benner (1:01) The bold beginning series and all of the collections in the Juice Box podcast are available in your audio app and at juiceboxpodcast.com in the menu. While you're listening, please remember that nothing you hear on the Juice Box podcast should be considered advice, medical or otherwise. Always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan or becoming bold with insulin.

Scott Benner (1:28) This episode is sponsored by Able Now, tax advantaged savings accounts for eligible individuals with disabilities. If you or your child lives with diabetes, you may qualify for an ABLE account because of ongoing medical needs, and many people in the diabetes community do. With ABLE Now, you can save for future expenses without affecting eligibility for certain disability benefits such as Medicaid. Learn more and check your eligibility at ablenow.com. You spell that ablenow.com.

Scott Benner (2:01) Today's episode is also sponsored by the Dexcom g seven, the same CGM that my daughter wears. Check it out now at dexcom.com/juicebox. The podcast is also sponsored today by the Omnipod five. And at my link, omnipod.com/juicebox, you can get yourself a free—what I just say?—a free Omnipod five starter kit. Free. Get out of here. Go click on that link. Omnipod.com/juicebox. Check it out. Terms and conditions apply. Eligibility may vary. Full terms and conditions can be found at omnipod.com/juicebox. Links in the show notes. Links at juiceboxpodcast.com.

Seventy-Two Days of Chaos

Zach (2:45) Alright. Hi, Scott. Thanks for having me. My name is Zach. Upstate New York is the location. My daughter was diagnosed with type one diabetes exactly seventy two days ago.

Scott Benner (2:58) Really? Yes. Wow. What has you here with me so quickly?

Zach (3:02) Well, I guess I tend to go down rabbit holes, and I'm quickly discovering that type one diabetes may be the ultimate hole. It's a hole. Alright.

Scott Benner (3:11) Yeah. There's a hole where I throw all my happiness and everything into. Yeah. Seventy two days ago. That's such a specific number. You're not, like, putting lines on the calendar or anything, are you?

Zach (3:23) No. I did that math just this morning. I was trying to think of—you know, I don't have a story like your last guest, Lauren, on your Nobel award winning greatest podcast ever—so I was trying to think of what's interesting about my story. And I guess you might say the perspective I have is just sort of that first hundred days of chaos. Yeah. And I said, how many days has it been? December 27.

Scott Benner (3:44) Yeah. Yeah. That's a story in itself. I'm glad you're doing this. But wait. Two days after Christmas?

Zach (3:49) Yeah. Correct. Oh my goodness. Alright.

Scott Benner (3:52) Well, let's find out about it. So prior to that day, anything on your radar, noticing changes, concerns, or did it all just happen at once?

Zach (4:03) Yeah. So my daughter was saturating her diapers. Right? I know that's one of the most common things. We were, I think, maybe motivated to try to potty train her because our other daughter was born 10/13/2025. And so we didn't wanna have two in diapers, but it became sort of urgent when those diapers were multiplying seemingly.

Scott Benner (4:26) Were you saying you don't wanna be buying diapers for two people is what your main focus?

Zach (4:31) I wouldn't put it on the financial aspect or just the physical. So I'm a 41 year old father of a two and a half year old and a two month old. I already had a bad back going into it.

Scott Benner (4:42) Zach, I feel like we need more background. Hold on a second. You have two kids. Is that right? Correct. Is this your first marriage?

Zach (4:50) Yep. This is my first marriage. We started kinda late, I guess. We got married in 2017. So we took our time with the kids. Some of that was because, you know, we weren't a 100% set on it from the beginning. And the other part of it was because by the time we decided it was what we wanted in life, it had become a lot harder than it might have been if we started earlier.

IVF and Genetic Questions

Scott Benner (5:13) You didn't have the energy to have sex, or there's just it wasn't taking—what was happening exactly?

Zach (5:18) Who knows what the cause was? Undiagnosed infertility challenges we did have. So both kids were IVF, so they're actually fraternal twins. I don't know what that means in terms of the chance that my younger one will also be type one.

Scott Benner (5:32) Oh, wait a minute. So you—if I use the wrong word, stop me—but you harvested two eggs, implanted one, then waited a little bit, and did the second one?

Zach (5:40) Yeah. So the way it works with IVF often is you're trying to get a bunch of healthy embryos, and then they kind of study them and they figure out which one has the best genetics, and that's usually the first one they'll put in. And some of them don't make it through the process of freezing and studying the DNA and all of that. So, you know, if you get 12 eggs and then, you know, a certain number of them make it to day five, which is when they freeze them, so then maybe you're left with six eggs. And then they study the DNA, three of them have imperfect genetics, which is, you know, what causes miscarriages. So then maybe you just have, in our case, three good embryos. And this was after, you know, multiple other trials where we didn't even get any good embryos, and so that could have just been age. They don't know why that happened in our case.

Zach (6:28) But eventually, you know, we had a beautiful daughter, and she's wonderful. But eventually, we learned she had type one diabetes. But yeah. So her sister was from the same clutch of eggs, and that's essentially the same thing as being fraternal twins.

Scott Benner (6:41) Do they use the word clutch or did you just say that?

Zach (6:44) No. I don't know where I got that term from, but it's sort of like when they take the eggs out of your wife, you know, it's like sort of a clutch of eggs. Yeah. No. I mean, that's a great term. I hear it all the time when people are breeding animals and reptiles and stuff like that.

Zach (6:57) Well, that's what we're doing, Scott. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, by the way, when your first ends up with type one, do you go back to the doctor and go, like, you told me you pulled out the healthiest. Like, what were you looking at exactly?

Zach (7:07) So, Scott, as you know, I think most people who get this diagnosis, they say, how did this happen? In our case, it's even more so because they've done all these assessments to make sure these are the perfect embryos. And—but I guess that in those tests that they run, there's not one that finds whatever codes for the precursors of type one diabetes even though after diagnosis, we found she had the two—what do they call it?—antibodies or whatever, two of the three markers that indicate you will eventually get diabetes, so they're able to confirm those.

AI Diagnosis and Hospitalization

Scott Benner (7:42) I mean, I don't even have any idea if that's a thing they could look for in that stage. But—

Zach (7:47) I guess maybe it develops later. The story does get a little better, Scott. So listen to this. Our second daughter is born, and my wife had some sort of, like, morning sickness, but the whole pregnancy, and that's called hyperemesis gravidarum. But, anyway, the baby comes out. The baby's healthy. She's a couple weeks early. She's okay on weight, but she is the first percentile of human height. So that combined with a couple other things, the doctor said, we wanna run a few more tests. This baby looks okay, but we wanna rule out a couple things. So I take that information. I enter it in chat GPT, and it tells me there is a one in seventy thousand chance that my daughter doesn't have a horrible genetic disease. So we are panicking from October to December that our second daughter has some rare condition.

Zach (8:50) We—now all the tests they ran came out negative. She does, as far as we know, not have a rare genetic condition, but that was like a crisis in and of itself. And then our other older daughter gets diagnosed with type one diabetes after all that. And what happened one morning was my older daughter had an ear infection. I entered that along with, "hey, she's also been drinking a lot of water and saturating her diapers" into ChatGPT. And ChatGPT says, "go to the emergency room right now. Your daughter has type one diabetes." I tell my family this. They don't believe me because of what happened with the other daughter.

Scott Benner (9:28) Yeah. No. AI told us the other kid was gonna grow a horn, and it didn't. So it's—wow. No. By the way, nobody trusts AI. So right. Did you lie and tell them you googled it? I might have done that if I was you.

Zach (9:42) No. I was honest. Yeah. My wife wanted me to go to the doctor for the ear infection, so I went and they pricked her finger as soon as I told them about the excessive urination.

Scott Benner (9:52) How about that? There it is. Yeah. My goodness. Well, how long do you think it would have gone on for if you didn't go to ChatGPT and just ask it? Do you think you would have figured it out on your own without something just mirroring right back to you and going, hey, that's—

Zach (10:05) You know, what's interesting about that question, Scott, is that so far, other than maybe some crankiness with highs, our daughter doesn't have the recognizable symptoms of highs or lows. And so I don't know how we would have known something was up other than the urination becoming intense, which, you know, I was like, well, maybe she's just, like, too big for the diapers now, and that's why they keep filling up so quickly.

Scott Benner (10:28) I had all those same kind of silly thoughts. How old is she exactly when she was diagnosed?

Zach (10:33) So she'll be three on April 15.

Scott Benner (10:35) April. So it was December. She was—

Zach (10:39) Two and a half ish. Arden was, like, a month past her second birthday. Yeah. I know. And we had that whole vibe thing going on too, like, the heavy diapers, and Arden was sicker than what you're describing.

Zach (10:52) Yeah. So they said we were in DKA, but maybe a mild form of it. So I think the acid wasn't too high or the ketones. Her blood sugar was about five eighty five. Our A1C at diagnosis was 12.2.

Scott Benner (11:07) You would have—I'm guessing it would have rolled over her pretty quickly in the coming weeks if you wouldn't have figured it out right then. So good job. Yeah. I mean, I'd hate to know what that looks like.

Management and Open Source Exploration

Scott Benner (11:16) No. It's not a lot of fun. So well done. I hope you felt good about it. I mean, I know that's a hard thing to say, but, like, you figured something out and saved her a lot of heartache.

Zach (11:23) Yeah. I guess maybe in a way. So day 72, I'm looking at a fourteen day GMI—if most of your audience knows what that is—of 6.9. We just crossed over that threshold from seven, which feels like a win. Feels like we're getting somewhere.

Scott Benner (11:43) Well, no. That's insane. Like, how are you accomplishing that? I mean, she's three. Right?

Zach (11:49) Yeah. So within two weeks, we were on a Dexcom. In less than a month, we were on an Omnipod five. We have been to our local pedendo practice who we got frustrated with, maybe unfairly because I was deep down the rabbit hole, and they weren't there with me quite so quickly. You know, as you know, some of the doctors are pretty conservative and guarded, especially with the little one trying to avoid lows. Right? Well, what does that mean? That means highs. So, you know, we then went to specialists at Yale, but they don't take insurance out of state. So now we're working with Columbia, and we've brought Jenny's firm Integrated into the mix. And we're not stopping. We're on Omnipod five, but we may be on Trio pretty soon here.

Scott Benner (12:35) You think you might try a DIY system?

Zach (12:37) I think so. I mean, I haven't listened to too many open source episodes yet, but I look forward to doing so. I mean, if I read the tea leaves on the forums, if I listen to the way a diabetic reviews Tandem or an Omnipod five, you'll hear things like, "but I'll never get the control I get on open source." So my instinct is let's go. You know? Let's do as good as we possibly can for my daughter.

Scott Benner (13:06) Yeah. I mean, don't know, man. It's—I think it's so personal and variable specific, right, down to, like, how active you are, how you eat, how particular you are about making sure your settings are good, pre-bolus. And there's a lot of different things. Right? So I see people do incredibly well on retail systems and all of them. Like, forget Omnipod five—but, yeah, I see people do well on all of them. I can never tell—I guess what I would wanna say is that I can never tell when someone's online and they're like, you know, product A, I didn't like, but product B is perfect for me. Sometimes I sit back and I wonder, like, is it maybe that they just learned more between the first one and the second one?

Zach (13:53) There's definitely some truth to that, Scott.

Scott Benner (13:55) Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, because you can make reasonable arguments for all the different algorithms. Right? Like, you say, well, Medtronic has that meal detection technology. I hear people who love that, love that. And there's people who are telling you, like, Omnipod five, like, look, it is, like, truly tubeless. That is incredibly important to me. People on Tandem talk about how well Tandem goes now. People are using Twist and enjoying that and etcetera. Like, they all seem pretty similar to me. Right? When they say personalized, I think there's just a lot more to it than that. And when somebody tells you they did vastly better on one than the other, it is always gonna make me wonder if I was there, what would I see that they're not seeing?

Sponsorship and Daily Management

Scott Benner (14:42) The Dexcom g seven is sponsoring this episode of the Juice Box podcast, and it features a lightning fast thirty minute warm up time. That's right. From the time you put on the Dexcom g seven till the time you're getting readings, thirty minutes. That's pretty great. It also has a twelve hour grace period, so you can swap your sensor when it's convenient for you. All that on top of it being small, accurate, incredibly wearable, and light, these things, in my opinion, make the Dexcom g seven a no brainer. The Dexcom g seven comes with way more than just this. Up to 10 people can follow you. You can use it with type one, type two, or gestational diabetes. It's covered by all sorts of insurances and—this might be the best part—alerts and alarms that are customizable so that you can be alerted at the levels that make sense to you. Dexcom.com/juicebox. Links in the show notes. Links at juiceboxpodcast.com to Dexcom and all of the sponsors. When you use my links, you're supporting the production of the podcast and helping to keep it free and plentiful.

Scott Benner (15:50) Today's episode is brought to you by Omnipod. Did you know that the majority of Omnipod five users pay less than $30 per month at the pharmacy? That's less than $1 a day for tube free automated insulin delivery. And a third of Omnipod five users pay $0 per month. You heard that right. Zero. That's less than your daily coffee for all of the benefits of tubeless, waterproof, automated insulin delivery. My daughter has been wearing an Omnipod every day since she was four years old. She's about to be 21. My family relies on Omnipod, and I think you'll love it. And you can try it for free right now by requesting your free starter kit today at my link, omnipod.com/juicebox. Omnipod has been an advertiser for a decade. But even if they weren't, I would tell you proudly, my daughter wears an omnipod. Omnipod.com/juicebox. Terms and conditions apply. Eligibility may vary. Why don't you get yourself that free starter kit? Full terms and conditions can be found at omnipod.com/juicebox.

Zach (16:53) Maybe I can give you a sense of who you're talking to, Scott. So I'm not a very good golfer, but you should see how many golf clubs I have in my basement.

Scott Benner (17:02) Think you're gonna own all these insulin pumps by 2027 maybe?

Zach (17:06) That may be where the sense of—

Scott Benner (17:09) Why is that? Why do you think? I've seen people collect insulin pump systems before too. They're always switching.

Zach (17:15) Yeah. So I think we need to get to a stasis pretty quickly for our own sanity. There's one feature of Trio that's particularly compelling. I think maybe Loop has it as well, but it's a remote bolus feature. The reason why that's important is my daughter recently returned to a daycare that my wife has been at all day helping them learn—that does not have a nurse. Today's actually the first day she's not there. And so Trio will give us the ability to do remote bolus. Now on the one hand, the better solution might be the Omnipod five as a very simple interface. Right? Let's get the staff trained and trust them. You know, if we switch to Trio with remote bolus, the onus might be back on us to manage her diabetes all day. But then I hear Lauren talk about the 150 units, and I'm pretty sure which I prefer.

Scott Benner (18:05) Oh, that's the one you're talking about. Oh, yeah. We just reran—

Zach (18:09) Oh, was that a rerun?

Scott Benner (18:10) Yeah. We reran school nurse mistake as the best of this week. It is really interesting, isn't it? Well, listen, man. I'm probably gonna sound opposite of what people are expecting me to say, but if you're a three year old who's only had diabetes for seventy two days, has a 6.9 A1C, I don't think I'd be in a huge hurry to change anything. I think that's pretty great.

Zach (18:35) Yeah. Well, thank you. That makes me feel good. But too bad, Scott, because I'm—would you like to see my other putter?

Scott Benner (18:48) I don't know. I really think it was the putter. It doesn't go in the hole. No, man. I think I'd ride it for a while just to see, like, what it is you can figure out. Because like you said, like, it's easy for, you know, people at day care to understand. What is your fear? Take the joking aside for a second. Like, what do you feel like isn't happening that needs to happen?

Financial Savings and Long-Term Care

Scott Benner (19:12) As I told you earlier, Able Now is sponsoring this episode. Able Now, of course, tax advantaged Able accounts for eligible individuals with disabilities. If you or your child lives with diabetes, you may qualify for an ABLE account because of ongoing medical needs. Many people in the diabetes community do. With ABLE now, you can save for future expenses without affecting eligibility for certain disability benefits such as Medicaid. And thanks to updates to federal law, ABLE accounts are now available to more people than ever before. That means more individuals and families can use ABLE now to save and invest. Funds in an ABLE now account can be used for a wide range of everyday needs, including education, transportation, health care, assistive technology, and more. There's no enrollment fee, and you can open an Able Now account with a small initial contribution and build from there. Learn more and check your eligibility at ablenow.com. That's ablenow.com.

Zach (20:12) Yeah. I mean, so you're speaking to someone who is in a current right now that will not stop moving of information and experiences managing diabetes. Right? So and I guess it's possible I'm not giving each iteration enough time to have its full effect. But I have heard things from clinicians who have said things like "my patients on Omnipod five are here, my patients on Tandem Mobi are here," and I don't even know what open source is. So there are some people suggesting better control, but I know—I guess when you say Arden's been on Omnipod for fourteen years, you don't mean Dash plus open source. You mean Omnipod five.

Scott Benner (20:57) No. Arden uses Trio. And before that, Loop, and before that Omnipod five and Dash before that. She used to have the Arrows pod too. Arden's been using Omnipod since she was, like, four maybe. But what I'm saying to you is—and maybe I'm wrong—maybe you've jammed your brain so full of information that you're not at that point yet, but I would wonder if you even know why you're turning the knobs you're turning at this point. Like, maybe you just need more experience, time in the simulator.

Zach (21:34) When we're high and we're actively giving corrections and somebody tells you, "you shouldn't have to do that, you need a more powerful algorithm that will do some of that for you." That's the kind of thing that makes me wanna switch. Right?

Scott Benner (21:47) How many times are you correcting during the day?

Zach (21:50) Oh, I don't know. I'd have to count, I guess. But, you know, we've had some pretty good days at day care, but there's a lot going on there. You know, she's a toddler. Right? We don't know how much she's gonna eat. So we do the partial pre-bolus, and then we do the rest when we see how much she ate. Right? Yeah. So what that means is you're gonna have timing issues with your insulin, and then you're gonna start chasing things here and there and giving gummies at the bottom and, you know, the roller coaster and just trying to tighten the roller coaster and find those rolling hills.

Scott Benner (22:25) I'm wondering, like, how many times do you have to interact with it over and above the bolusing for the meals?

Zach (22:31) Well, I don't know. There's two boluses per meal in theory except when she's like, "I want more berries. I want a banana." You're just giving more and more and more, you know, if you're behind the curve.

Scott Benner (22:44) What's your expectation that—Trio is an example—what's your expectation that Trio would do that Omnipod five isn't doing?

Zach (22:52) Well, if there's three moments a day where we're going from 200 to two fifty and giving three corrections as it creeps up and none of them seem to be powerful enough—even though, really, we're probably just not waiting long enough for the insulin to work—maybe with Trio, we give one correction, but because the basal's already more aggressively chasing it, we don't have to do as many of those. I guess that's the theory.

Honeymooning and the "Reptile Expert" Analogy

Scott Benner (24:24) I know I've probably mentioned more than enough times that I have a couple of reptiles that I keep. And I talk to people who are experts. Like, I've made a couple of, like, close friends who have been doing this for a really long time and have decades and decades of experience, and they'll tell you the same thing. You can buy an automated misting system for your reptile's cage. So you can put it on a timer, and it'll squirt at a certain time for as long as you want and keep the humidity where you want it to. But most of those experts will tell you, when you first get the animal, just get a bottle and mist them by hand because it makes you get in front of the cage and look at it, and it makes you just experience it and have touch points, and you learn by standing there doing it yourself a little bit. And then, you know, you'll figure out where the impacts are coming from and where you need a little more water and a little less or etcetera and so on. And then you'd go ahead and buy that system if you want to that does it automatically because you'll know how to set it up right. And I feel like it's the seventy two days thing. If this was six months into this or a year into this, I'd be like, yeah, man. Follow your heart. I don't think you know enough yet to know what you don't know. You got good energy. Obviously, there's a lot of caffeine going on over there.

Zach (25:46) I'm on prednisone, you know, because we've gotten, like, the flu four times this year, Scott.

Scott Benner (25:53) Anything better than a steroid pack high as an older man? Your back probably isn't even stiff right now.

Zach (26:00) That's exactly right. I was sitting in the car this morning and thinking to myself, is there some safe way to get this effect on a regular basis?

Scott Benner (26:09) There's not. I'm afraid. You can't take the steroid pack for long or too many times in a certain year. I guess let's start over for a second. You leave that hospital with a little baby at New Year's. Terrible. You said you had a CGM pretty quickly. Obviously, they got you on Omnipod five pretty quickly. And she's at day care, or were you guys home with her for a while before she went back to day care?

Zach (26:54) So we get out of the hospital on December 30, or they kick us out, I should say. We're scared to go home, but they kick us out three days later or so. And she gets back to supervised day care February, so just a couple weeks ago. And this is another fascinating thing, Scott. So her honeymooning behavior changed when her activity level went up and she went back to day care. So we're in Upstate New York. There's been a two foot snowpack since November. Right? So it's hard to get the kids active. And as soon as she goes back to day care—she goes from this aggressive honeymoon where with no insulin on board sometime after 2AM, she drops out of the sky, like, 200 points. And now that she's at daycare, she's more stable overnight. She's going low over and over again during the day. So that's been fascinating to kind of observe.

Scott Benner (28:06) It's only been a couple weeks then. But you're experiencing lows every day? Around food or after food?

Zach (28:16) It's in between the meals probably once the pre-bolusing and then the post-meal bolusing finally starts kicking in and she's running around with her classmates, and we get lows. Yeah. We think there is still a honeymoon existing. Her c-peptide was 0.3. So she didn't have much pancreas activity left, but, apparently, that's still enough to produce some insulin. And given that we know, you know, six hours after we've given her any insulin at night that she could drop 200 points, I think we're pretty sure the honeymoon is still active.

Lifestyle and Diet

Zach (29:01) We're trying around the edges to control. One of the things that's been really interesting, Scott, is the idea of trying to learn how to bolus for anything versus—I started making my own chicken nuggets. Let's offer lower carb options. Let's have cottage cheese for breakfast. Let's put the strawberries in and not the pineapple and the blueberries because we're learning about glycemic index. There's an individual named David who's very active in some of the forums online—I think he's in Australia somewhere—and his kid's 99% in range. And he's super low carb. I don't think it's gonna be easy for us to get there right now. Because if our daughter doesn't have what her classmates are eating, she's gonna throw a fit.

Scott Benner (30:10) You're so new to this. I wish I could explain to you how new you are because you've done a great job of, like, absorbing a lot in a short amount of time. Is that your nature?

Zach (30:23) Yeah. I mean, I'm a management consultant. I used to work in the health care industry. Now I work in the water and sewer industry. I deal with a lot of technical information, so I guess it's in my nature. Researcher. Honestly, my first reaction to the question of what I've learned is just the humanity of the diabetes community. It just warms your heart. All these people kind of struggling together and thriving together. I can't tell you how many people I spoke to in those first few weeks just because you find a family friend who knows somebody who knows somebody who has type one, and they say, "please give me a call. I've been there." This whole idea that open source exists, Scott, is completely absurd. There are some people who would never trust it, right, because they don't trust technology at all. There's the MDI crowd.

Scott Benner (31:33) I have a great interview somewhere of an older woman who just said she's like, "I don't know. The pumps, they scare me." And I asked her why, and she's like, "well, what if China hacks into my pump?"

Zach (31:43) No. But I understand the perspective. I'm amazed by the open source community. By the way that this community has sort of grabbed ahold of this disease and is trying to wrangle it. I met somebody in a local shop who was a diabetic and told me that she calls her diabetes her dragon. You can never control it, but you try to manage it the best you can. But just this great community that's kind of grown up to help each other through it has been absolutely inspiring. Of all the positives you can take from diabetes, I'd give it away tomorrow. I'd do anything to get rid of it for my daughter tomorrow.

The Surge in Autoimmune Conditions

Scott Benner (32:36) I don't think there should be any reason for you to rush to make a change. I think that you should probably absorb just more time in the simulator so you can make a better decision. If you expect Trio to just solve all of the problems you're having, I don't know that that's gonna happen.

Zach (34:24) We're 75% in range over the last two weeks with a 46 standard deviation. We're only seven and a half units a day, basal and bolus combined. She's so small, probably thirty seven pounds. Her vocabulary has blossomed. I mean, getting insulin into every cell in her body, you can see neurological effects. It's just been amazing. Is there an episode you guys have done that's talked about these environmental factors that they suspect are driving up the rates of T1D in our youth in this country?

Scott Benner (35:52) You think they're moving up?

Zach (35:53) Yeah. Marty McCary, who's the head of the FDA right now, I heard in an interview say that one in six girls born today is diagnosed with an autoimmune condition, and they do not know why.

Scott Benner (36:08) Yeah. There's a lot of autoimmune. To diabetes specifically, the one thing that has always kinda struck me in the last couple of years is how many people are diagnosed after an illness, but kinda more specifically a virus. So if the whole world got a virus in 2020, it makes sense to me that more people were diagnosed after that.

Zach (36:41) That's fair. But in theory, those people would have gotten it anyway, Scott. My understanding is that the incidence has gone up significantly over more like a forty year time frame.

Scott Benner (38:24) Let's ask the magic machine. I have Gemini Pro here. "The incidence and prevalence of autoimmune disease in the US has accelerated significantly over the past forty years, increasing at a much steeper rate than it did the forty years prior. Genetics play a role in autoimmunity, but human DNA does not mutate fast enough to account for such massive population-wide spikes in just a few decades. This points to modern environmental and lifestyle shifts as primary drivers. Researchers tested preserved blood samples and found that the prevalence of antinuclear antibodies jumped from eleven percent in '88 to sixteen point one percent in 2012. The prevalence of type one has nearly doubled in the past forty years, and celiac disease has increased fivefold."

Zach (40:32) That's what I'm talking about. Nobody knows why, Scott.

Scott Benner (40:40) Food's probably worse. Stuff we spray to keep weeds down. At some point in our history, everybody's growing food on their property. It works until there's a bazillion people and somebody says, "what if we put all that stuff in a pile and made food out of it that didn't rot right away?" Go buy a loaf of bread from a bakery and it's green in four days, but the other stuff isn't. You start microwaving plastic, all those processed oils—it can't be good.

Zach (42:23) Did you guys go, like, all glass everything? Is that part of where your diabetes journey took you?

Scott Benner (42:29) We don't use much plastic here. We don't use Teflon pans. There's coconut oil and olive oil. But I don't know, man. Like, maybe there's radon in my basement. What am I gonna do? We all gotta live here. There's no other place to go.

Zach (42:56) I know you're doing something right, Scott. And I just hope for the same success for my daughter that your daughters have. Seventy two days in, here we go.

Scott Benner (43:04) Let's call the episode "Seventy Two Days Later." I've been messing with a little reference library at juiceboxpodcast.com/jbpaiex for 32 different autoimmune conditions. You can check off symptoms like depression, back pain, fatigue, and it shows you overlaps. It's not a diagnostic tool, just educational. This is part one. Make sure you find part two in your feed right now.

Scott Benner (48:01) I can't thank you enough for listening. Please make sure you're subscribed. I'll be back tomorrow. Check out the private Facebook group—beautiful group, wonderful people. Juice Box podcast, type one diabetes on Facebook. If you want your podcast to sound fantastic, Wrongwayrecording.com.

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