Diabetes Mine - a “gold mine of straight talk and encouragement for people living with diabetes” - truly lives up to its tagline. Maintained by “inquisitive, perhaps-just-a-tad overly analytical new diabetic” Amy Tenderich, the blog performs the very valuable service of keeping readers informed with health news, product reviews, and interviews - such as this recent Q & A with diabetes expert and Guide to Healthy Restaurant Eating author Hope Warshaw. An excerpt:

DM: It’s hard to know what to eat with diabetes. What is the first thing you’d tell a person newly diagnosed with pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes about eating?

HW: More than likely a person with pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes has some weight to trim off. Therefore, I want to help them find some easy ways to accomplish this goal. One of the first things I talk about is not what people eat, but what they drink. Are you downing a Caramel Macchiato every day? Are you guzzling Gatorade? People can drink 1,000 calories in beverages through the course of the day without realizing it, so that’s an A-Number-1 priority. People can have weight melting off them just by changing what they drink.

Carb Attack tracks one blogger’s journey through the 30-in-30 low carb diet challenge, an effort to shed 30 pounds in 30 weeks. Also working to manage her diabetes, Kathryn has sought some help from Dr. Richard K. Bernstein’s book The Diabetes Diet (a low-carb solution to keeping diabetes in check). The results thus far:

“So Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetic Diet seems to be working! If you are diabetic or insulin resistant, I recommend it. It’s extremely low carb, so many people have a hard time staying on it. But I find that the good results I get make me willing to stick with it pretty well so far.”

Organic Authority lures us in with their recipes for decadent-yet-organic treats like Frozen Hot Chocolate and Marjoram-Scented Pears with Gorgonzola, but sometimes the health alerts strike our fancy just as much. Case in point: Organic Authority’s post on the potential benefits of keeping up your coffee habit. New research shows that drinking coffee - especially decaf - could slash your diabetes risk by up to 33 percent.

For people suffering from gastroparesis (a digestive condition especially common in diabetics), testing can involve lots of invasive, expensive, and uncomfortable procedures that sometimes don’t yield an accurate diagnosis for up to two years. But now SmartPill Corporation has developed a capsule that - when swallowed - records diagnostic information and transmits it to a receiver worn by a patient, according to Health News Blog. About the size of a multivitamin, SmartPill is now being considered for approval by the FDA.

ThisNext is intrigued by The Diabetes Blog’s news that Nestlé is developing a new line of products geared toward “people concerned about their health, their weight, and diabetes.” We’re not sure how the manufacturer is going to go about using naturally occurring fats and fibers to create “high-tech food products that are tasty but bypass the usual harmful effects of junk food on the body.” But we’re definitely curious to try out its new cereal bar, a fiber-enriched snack “designed to avoid a surge in blood sugar after it has been eaten.”