Mother Earth hates diabetes, too

Art Supplies, by Flickr user courtney.benefiel, also author of RideToRemedy.com blog.Used under Creative Commons license

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. We’ve heard that one before. Unfortunately, when it comes to Type 1 diabetes, that old adage doesn’t apply. But this one does:

“An ounce of insulin is worth a pound of trash.”

Sara Sklaroff, Editor-at-Large of Diabetes Forecast magazine (who always writes entertaining articles) discusses just that in the magazine’s February issue. She writes:

“as committed as I am to recycling (and reusing, and repairing), I still amass a big pile of junk each month that is destined for the landfill. Diabetes junk, that is. Living with diabetes—particularly if you are injecting insulin—means generating a lot of waste that cannot go into the recycling bin. And I feel guilty about it.”

Sara’s right. There are lots of pieces of trash that come along with diabetes. Some of it is actually used before being discarded, and other stuff is just packing material or other junk. But how much trash ARE we generating? Let’s take a look: