Tariana Turia

This week is Diabetes Awareness Week and Tariana Turia is calling on the whanau of people with diabetes to take practical steps to support their loved ones.

While diabetes prevention needed to be the priority through healthy eating and regular exercise, Mrs Turia said there were practical ways that people with diabetes and their whanau could adopt to manage the condition.

"Next week I go into hospital for what is called a gastric bypass, otherwise referred to as stomach stapling, so that I can rid myself of diabetes," said Mrs Turia said, who was diagnosed with type two diabetes about 20 months ago.

"While my imagination was going into overdrive, my whanau were rapidly assembling a whanau healthy lifestyle plan - George, my husband, who does most of our cooking started taking a far more critical look at what we ate by radically changing our evening meals. My daughter Lisa also began to watch me like a hawk, preparing salads of goodness and pouncing on me if I dared to look at something that I shouldn't be eating," Mrs Turia said.

"It has also led to my teenage mokopuna getting out of bed at the crack of dawn to take me swimming. "My mokopuna, and my mokopuna tuarua - they provide me with the greatest reason in the world to make sure that being healthy becomes my most pressing priority as well."

There are are more than 200,000 people in New Zealand who suffer from diabetes, which is caused by having too much glucose (sugar) in the blood. "The best chronic disease management strategies will inevitably come unstuck unless they are supported at home.

"So if you have a whanau member who has diabetes, the best thing you can do for them is to support them, not just emotionally, but with real practical measures like helping them to do up a healthy eating and exercise plan."