Diabetes is like a boxing match in a way if you do not eat a good diabetic friendly and heart friendly recipes and diet from the American diabetes association low sodium veggies and fruits your diabetes might get worse. I bought a good diabetic friendly and heart friendly cookbooks from the American diabetes association years ago on clearance sale. I take my medicine for my diabetes twice a day too
My aic is 6.2 too.

I had never heard that either (about colon cancer).

I do know that there is a whole pile of "off label" clinical testing about using Metformin as a heart disease preventative - they have been getting decent results but like everything, it takes "years" before it gets out of stage 3 trials.

But it is almost not surprising that Metformin could help prevent a number of things.

It's used in diabetes because it "messes with the liver". In (our case) it kinda puts a lid on how much stored sugar the Liver can release. But the liver has a ton of "jobs" and removing toxins from our system is a biggie.

It's also responsible for all the cholesterol in our system - it comes from the liver, not the food we eat, something that they really just figured out in the last decade - so all those years of "don't eat eggs because of the cholesterol" simply proved that the food guide people "jumped on the bandwagon" before the science caught up to the point where "very quietly" any reference to a "recommended daily intake of dietary cholesterol" has been removed from everywhere.

(sorry - I do go on tangents)

Point I was trying to make - metformin "does something" to the liver. They probably don't completely understand, but if it's positive then perhaps it gives the liver some "extra ability" to take care of toxins (or whatever) that could be drivers/pre-cursors to other diseases (??????)

Jeer - had never heard that about metfomin & colon cancer. Useful to know. Not on meds yet, but strong family hist of colon cancer & get colonoscopies every 5 yes.

Hey @A DiabetesTeam Member - actually the Mediterranean diet will "give you" a few more years statistically and the more closely you follow its (rules) the better the outcome.

In general a low carb diet does reduce our life expectancy due to the reduced nutrient intake coupled with the difficulty in keeping saturated and trans-fats "out" of our system since most often the carbs that we would typically eat are replaced with fats.

So if you are on a Modified Med diet and you compared it to my Low Carb/High Fat I'm sure if we crunched the numbers "your way of eating" is more heart healthy, better for blood pressure and cholesterol then "my way of eating" which is "deficient" in veggies in particular and gets almost 60% of my calories from fat of which about 75% of that fat is "animal fat".

So both of us have super diabetes friendly "low carb" diets and if we prevail it won't be a diabetes complication that gets us. But in my case, the particular low carb diet "I follow" is probably hard on my Cardio Vascular system which will reduce my life expectancy by that 4 years.

In your case, the closer you follow the Med diet (which is the top rated diet for "total health") it should (statistically) add years by helping prevent "non-diabetic related" issues/complications.

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A Diabete...

Yes, my gastro doctor said that metformin is an inexpensive drug an clinical trials are underway to see how it can help in the aging process with disease and dementia.