The pocket glucose meter is an indispensable tool of grass roots diabetes treatment. It empowers an individual to study precisely what effects food and medications have on their blood sugar. Everyone becomes independent of bad dietary advice and can test their blood sugar for their own reference.  The chief source of bad dietary advice comes from the official diabetes associations around the world. E.g., Dr. Biffa criticizes the iatrogenic nutrition advice of Diabetes UK in a post:  If Diabetes UK wants to help diabetics, I suggest it stops recommending a diet that I think is utterly unsuitable for diabetics

At the end of the post, Helen Howes comments:

When diagnosed (after a sudden descent into Type 2 caused by steroids, quite expected) I was given a wonkily-printed one-side-of-A4 diet sheet which said things like “Don’t eat tinned fruit in syrup, eat the fruit in juice” and “Eat porridge (or unsweetened cereals) for breakfast every day.”
The diabetes nurse said pretty much the same:
Nurse “You should eat porridge for breakfast”
Me “I tried that, numbers went 4.5 (before) then 30, 1.6, 28, 2.5, 12, then it’s lunchtime*

* For Americans 80, 540, 28, 500, 45, 215 etc..

Nurse “Oh, you shouldn’t test, you’ll scare yourself”

A low carb approach (all over the web like a rash, I wonder why) stabilised and sorted my A1c, weight, and blood sugars so quickly.. I asked very sweetly if the local branch was “trying to keep itself in work” and got thrown out.. My doctor suggested I was no longer diabetic.. I offered to eat a bun and sit in the waiting room testing every 15 minutes..

So, it’s like Weightwatchers. If it worked really well (or at all, in the long run) it would do itself out of a job sooo quickly..

And the list of sponsors..?

UK doctors kill their diabetes patients with their dietary recommendations. If diabetes is carbohydrate intolerance than why do physicians and nurses around the world tell patients to eat a diet that primarily consists of carbohydrate? Why? Ancel Keys and fat phobia. Nutrition science is turned on its head because we ignore all the evidence that diabetics tolerate fat very well–Ignore your glucose tester at your peril. The nurse told Helen to stop testing herself after the recommended high carb meals, because she’ll scare herself. This is an ostrich approach and it is necessary because the high carb meals that the diabetic associations around the world recommend causes blood sugar to spike. But then when you receive most of your funding from wheat and sugar interests, well it’s hardly surprising that you tell people not to stop looking at their glucose meters. This is a scandal of enormous proportions.