In 2016, AC-SE MI received a grant from Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan Foundation for the “diabetes prevention program”. In July of 2016, the program started for the proposed workshops among 4 Asian ethnic groups,
The Diabetes Prevention Program offers workshops using the curriculum of “Diabetes Prevention Program” (DPP), developed by CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention). The CDC DPP is a one-year program and is targeted to pre-diabetic participants. The first 16 weeks, participants will meet weekly for an hour, and then monthly thereafter. The 16 week curricula mainly include healthy eating and weekly exercise with the simple program goals: 1) reduce weight by 7%; and 2) exercise moderately at least 150 minutes weekly; then the rest of the year is to monitor their progress and meet once a month.
Under a grant received from Blue Shield of Michigan Foundation in 2016, the CDC DPP had to be modified so that it was more applicable to many Asian Americans. Since obesity does not seem to be the main reason that Asian Americans have a higher prevalence of diabetes. The 7% weight loss may put some participants in jeopardy for malnutrition. We could only teach them “healthy eating” to stay healthy, not for weight reduction. That also made one of the biomarkers used in the DPP, the waist circumference, not applicable to certain Asian Americans. It may apply to Filipinos and South Asians (including Asian Indians), but not for Southeast Asians (Chinese, and Korean). Instead of measuring their waist circumference, we used their A1C measurement as the relevant biomarker.
