Submitted Photo Shelby Stein, community dietitian, with the Fort Berthold Diabetes Program conducts a healthy cooking class in August 2019.

NEW TOWN – One in three American adults has prediabetes, putting them at risk for eventual diabetes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Fort Berthold Diabetes Program looks not only to assist those living with diabetes but also works to help people avoid developing the chronic illness. In recent years, it has offered the National Diabetes Prevention Program to educate people at risk about healthy lifestyles. The most recent offering was in the fall of 2018. A class proposed to start in March was put off due to coronavirus precautions.

The goal of the program is to prevent Type II diabetes, said Shelby Stein, registered dietitian with the Fort Berthold Diabetes Program. To participate in the program, a person must have been diagnosed with pre-diabetes or carry a risk of developing Type II diabetes or have had gestational diabetes. The class draws participants from their late 20s into their 70s.

“Being Native American puts people at a higher risk of developing diabetes,” Stein said. “The aim of the program is to teach different lifestyle changes that help reduced the risk of diabetes.”

A major focus of the diabetes prevention program is nutrition, and the course goes into detail on how people can eat healthier, Stein said. It teaches how to make healthier choices when eating out and setting up home and work environments in ways that encourage healthy food choices.

Participants get a short cooking demonstration or have a healthy snack prepared for them with a recipe offered. They review local restaurant menus and learn how to make the healthiest selections from those menus.

Another major component of the course is physical activity. Participants are encouraged to engage in at least 150 minutes of activity each week. Stein said those activities can be as simple as taking a walk.

“It’s literally anything participants want to do as long as people are moving,” she said.

Participants receive information on different exercises and ways to motivate themselves to exercise.

“Through the combination of those diet changes and the course on physical activity, the goal is, hopefully, to promote weight loss,” Stein said. “Research does show if we can lose about 5 to 7 percent of our body weight, if we are overweight to begin with, that can greatly reduce our risk of developing Type II diabetes.”

The six-month follow-up after the four months of classes aids in creating accountability so people maintain lifestyle changes.

“The goal of those six follow-up months is to keep people engaged and keep them on track,” Stein said. “Sometimes with lifestyle changes like exercise routines, we kind of fall out of those habits when we don’t have a good group to keep us motivated.”

Many people who complete the program report that they are using the tools they learned and maintaining their changes long-term, Stein said. The hope is they will take what they learned into their homes and change family habits that impact the diabetes rate for future generations, she added.

“Everything we do here is geared toward a family approach,” Stein said. “This isn’t just something we want you to do but it’s the same nutrition guidelines and activity goals that everyone in the whole family should be doing. There’s nothing extreme or drastic in this program. It’s just focused on healthy lifestyle changes.”

In 2019, Elbowoods Memorial Health Center in New Town and its field clinics in Mandaree, Twin Buttes, Parshall and White Shield served 6,790 patients, and 845 of those patients had diagnosed diabetes. The 12.4% is close to the 13% rate for all U.S. adults estimated by the CDC in 2018.

Education and services through the Fort Berthold Diabetes Program and the clinic have helped lower the diabetes rate, Stein said. Local availability of the continuous glucose monitoring system, which enables people to monitor blood sugar without drawing blood with a needle prick, also has been made a difference, she said.