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Diabetes Support Group releases cookbook

July 23, 2025
in Headline News
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The Pocahontas County Diabetes Support Group celebrated the release of its new cookbook last Monday with a picnic featuring diabetes friendly and heart healthy fare at Stillwell Park. Posing with the book are, from left: diabetes educator Terry Wagner, Dr. Samantha Minc and vascular surgery resident Jordan O’Dell. The book will soon be available from Amazon. S. Stewart photo

Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer

It’s been three years in the making, but all the hard work and collaboration has paid off for members of the Pocahontas County Diabetes Support Group. With the help of Dr. Samantha Minc and then medical student Jordan O’Dell, the group and its educator, Terry Wagner, have published and are releasing a diabetes and heart healthy cookbook featuring local recipes.

Oddly enough, the name of the book is “Pocahontas County Diabetes and Heart Healthy Cookbook.”

The endeavor began in 2023 when Minc and O’Dell joined Wagner in providing educational programs for the group and they decided to make a cookbook of what they’d learned.

At first, the group planned to just share recipes with each other, but it quickly grew to include so much more.

“We have the recipes on one page and the modified recipe on the next page with an explanation,” Minc said. “There were a bunch from the culinary medical program at WVU that kind of added to fill out the cookbook.

“Then at the back is a conversation about how to make a healthy meal and what is your key to success, an example grocery list and diet rules,” she added.

The book also features information about foot health, which is one of the reasons Minc got involved in the program.

In 2017, WVU did a state level analysis concerning diabetes and access to medical treatment. Minc, a vascular surgeon, is focused on prevention of amputations due to diabetes and vascular disease and so she wanted to provide education concerning foot health which is directly affected by diabetes.

“We did focus groups across the state, spoke to people with diabetes or people who were taking care of people with diabetes about amputations and tried to understand their barriers and challenges,” she said.

Using the findings from that research, Minc started working with doctors in Pocahontas County to ensure foot examinations were being done on patients with diabetes.

“We came up with this trio of interventions and one of which was implementing high quality diabetic exams in clinics and connecting people to pediatrist, so they can get care,” she said. “Another was making multi-disciplinary limb preservation teams and making them available to rural patients in a project called Echo.”

Echo is a teleconferencing medical platform that allows rural patients to meet with podiatrist to ensure they have preventative care and be less likely to need an amputation.

The third was meeting with the diabetes support group and creating the cookbook.

Minc enlisted O’Dell, who is now a vascular surgery resident at Duke University. At the time of the project, O’Dell was a medical student at WVU and was part of the new culinary medical track.

“WVU offers an additional learning track that you can do within medical school that’s called a culinary track,” O’Dell said. “We have to do community teaching kitchens. We do different modules. We learn how to prescribe diets for different chronic illnesses, such as cancer, diabetes, chronic heart failure.”

O’Dell came to Pocahontas County and did a food insecurity environmental study and provided teaching kitchens at the food pantry.

Then Minc and O’Dell got connected with Wagner who was leading the monthly Diabetes Support Group at the Pocahontas County Family Resource Network, and it all came together.

“They’ve been working together, meeting monthly,” Minc said. “They had a great curriculum. Whatever resources she wants that I can help provide, either through WVU or Duke, I try to help them get. They’ve been doing such a great job, and the cookbook idea was the fruition, the big thing of our partnership.”

While the cookbook is a great achievement, the results from the foot health intervention is an even bigger achievement.

“The clinics – not only did they increase the number of foot exams, they decreased the number of people that required hospitalizations or visits for ulcers,” Minc said. “They decreased the number of foot ulcers that were appearing in clinics.

“We were just checking to see if we could get people to do more foot exams,” she continued. “Those numbers were way amazing, but also, the outcome numbers were amazing.”

Next up is getting the cookbook to the masses.

Minc said she and Wagner will be doing a book tour for “Pocahontas County Diabetes and Heart Healthy Cookbook” throughout West Virginia and it will be available online.

A digital version will be free to download, and the physical copy will be available from Amazon.

All proceeds from the book will go to the FRN and the diabetes support group.

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