For our podcast, we studied type 2 diabetes because there are high prevalence rates in the South. The focus of our podcast was to look at how living in the South and partaking in southern culture can affect one’s experience with diabetes. We wanted to examine whether people living in the South are more susceptible to type 2 diabetes due to the diet and the culture of the South. For instance, southern food is notorious for having high levels of sugar, butter, and salt. Fast food restaurants like Chick-fil-A and Kentucky Fried Chicken are symbols of the South, and they predominantly serve fried food. Another common southern staple is sweet tea. However, sweet tea contains a lot of sugar, and drinking it on a regular basis could put one at risk for type 2diabetes. Overall, there are several factors that are unique to the South that could put one at a heightened risk for type 2 diabetes.
Diabetes Digest is a podcast created by an interdisciplinary team of students at Georgia Tech. In this podcast, we focus our storyline around type 1 diabetes and the experience of living with this chronic illness. Type 1 diabetes, also known as juvenile or insulin-dependent diabetes, is a condition where the body’s immune system starts attacking the pancreas, which weakens and ultimately destroys the beta cells, the body’s main producer of insulin. In some cases, like with our interviewee Patrick*, the immune system has a faulty response to a sickness. In the podcast, we capture the challenging experience of being a college student with type 1 diabetes due to the nature of the disease as well as its financial burden, and this became the main point to drive our podcast. Many people have false perceptions and lack knowledge about type 1 diabetes; the stakes of our podcast were to give a voice to the diabetic community, especially in informing the college community. In conclusion, living with type 1 diabetes is a very unique challenge for each individual, and our podcast ends on a note for the audience to reflect on that challenge – in this case, the unique challenges of our interviewees