Monongalia General Hospital hosted an all-day diabetes fair. Health care providers there say getting the word out about the disease is the most important step in controlling it.

"Heart Disease, high blood pressure, unfortunately depression, high stress levels, all of these things do go hand in hand with diabetes," said Andrea McCarty, the hospital's diabetes education coordinator. "We wanted to provide information on all of those topics and areas."

The fair brought together health care, education, and other services to help people cope with diabetes. There were screenings for risk factors like high blood pressure blood glucose, or sugar, and body fat percentage.

There were also tools and interactive demonstrations on how to lower those risk factors.

"Just looking a little bit deeper at the food labels," clinical nutritionist Beth Semmens offered. "You can make a better choice, a more healthy choice."

Semmens was showing passers-by the difference in similar snack foods, like gel fruit cups and applesauce.

"The first ingredient is apples, compared to water, so this is going to be a fruit choice," she explained to one man at the fair, pointing to the food labels.

Semmens said that approach works the best.

"If I tell you what to eat, it's not going to work," she said, "you're going to do what you want to do, but If it teach you how to read food labels and how to make better choices, in the long term, that's much better."

A key to a healthy diet is making sure it's a balanced diet.

"I don't believe in good or bad food," Semmens said. "A diet for people with diabetes is just a healthy diet that contains food from all the food groups, but we want to control our portion sizes, increase the fiber and watch the fats."

Diet is only one of the tools used to control blood sugar, weight and prevent other complications from diabetes and ensure high quality of life.

"For many because of testing blood glucose and following up with a physician and maybe exercising more and eating better, things we normally re commend with diabetes," McCarty said, "if you start doing those things because of an elevated blood glucose you could actually be living healthier with diabetes than you were before you were diagnosed."

Those changes can also help lower the risk factor for the disease.

This is the second year for the diabetes fair, and McCarty said they had a much higher turn-out, from both employees and members of the community.

The American Diabetes Association has claimed November as National Diabetes Month, and Mon General plans to host the fair again next year.