Good work Angela. I certainly agree that there has to be a balance and Joslin represented an extreme in treatment philosophy that was unbalanced. But I would also suggest that it was also extreme of the ADA to suggest that you could just go about life as usual (without concern for diet and exercise) if you just took your insulin as ordered. As diabetics started living longer, the number of complications in the 40s and beyond exploded. And once the DCCT came out, the ADA accepted that tight control led to fewer complications but was unwilling to budge on the "life as usual" position. In my opinion, that is why to this day we see the nutrition guidance saying that you should eat as though you don't have diabetes. Wolpert and Kahn have been very outspoken in stating the position that patients just "can't be bothered" to worry about diet and exercise. Given what we know today, that is an extreme view and should be tempered with understanding that attention to diet can bring better blood sugar control. It should be a personal decision about whether you want to have a strict diet and exercise, but it is wrong (and unbalanced) to withhold information from the public that these treatments work.
ps. As a final note, one must also take the view presented in "Cheating Destiny" in context, the brother of the author is the noted diabetes clinician Irl Hirsh who is an "insider" at the ADA and the author does up front note that his brother is a primary source.