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For Cambodians with diabetes, MoPoTsyo patient information centre has developed a six session course. Participants are encouraged to learn about their own disease, set realistic personal objectives and get their disease under control.

The course facilitator is someone who has diabetes, a peer educator.

Diabetics learn about their disease from the peer educator and by joining group sessions with fellow diabetics from their own community, lead by the community’s peer educator who has been trained, supported and supervised by MoPoTsyo’s diabetes program manager.

People can re-join the sessions as often as they want and they can volunteer to help conducting the sessions, so they get involved in teaching.

Step by step patients gain practical understanding on how they can improve their own control over the disease and slow down its progress. The course consists of six sessions:

–  Explanation of basic biological mechanisms

–  How diabetes affect the basic biological mechanisms

–  How to restore and keep the blood glucose balance

–  How to buy medicine

–  Nutrition and what is healthy eating for Cambodian diabetics

–  How to test, measure and recordyour progress

During the course special attention is given to life style changes. Most Cambodian diabetics do not know that white rice is highly glycemic and contains large quantities of glucose. [Please see our study] Many eat three times per day a full plate of white rice with little else.  A great help for the peer educators is MoPoTsyo’s food pyramid. Every registered patient receives a poster with this pyramid. Itshows commonly eaten food items based on their glycemic index: high glycemic index items in the top, and low glycemic index items in the green layer at the pyramid’s bottom. The pyramid is mainly meant to help hyperglycemic diabetes type 2 patients to get their glucose levels down by encouraging them to replace white rice with the many healthier sources of carbohydrates that you can find at the bottom of the pyramid. Are you curious to see this pyramid? Click here