Living with diabetes has changed in many ways over the years. No matter what, however, it is always important to be vigilant, a lesson learned well by New London resident Julian “Yudi” Rubin.

Rubin, 85, has been a Type 1 diabetic patient for 75 years, and he recently received a medal from the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston for living with his condition for 75 years. He has noticed the drastic changes in diabetic treatment over the years; however, no matter the circumstance, he has always monitored his chronic condition.

Rubin was diagnosed with diabetes when he was 10 years old. Back in the early years, until the early 1920s, diabetes was treated with a strict protein diet. Now, however, injections are the norm.

“They kept them alive on a strictly protein diet,” Rubin said. “And protein — everything breaks down into glucose eventually — so it was a short-lived situation.”

Diabetes patients do not have the insulin required to gain energy from food. Insulin allows glucose to enter the body’s cells, while lack of insulin leaves too much sugar in the bloodstream, causing a range of major health issues.

“Going way back, into the first 40 years of my life, it was injections (of insulin) once a day,” Rubin said.

Since his diagnosis, Rubin has been receiving treatment and care from the Joslin Diabetic Clinic in Boston, and he said medical people there have been graciously helpful to him over the years.

“The first diet they gave my mother when I was at Joslin consisted of a breakfast of bacon, eggs, milk and toast, and that was what I ate every single morning,” Rubin said. “It’s very strange for a kosher Jewish home to bring bacon, but in this case, it was considered like a medication. I got sick of eating it and got a different menu.”

Rubin said his condition scared his parents.

“At that time I was 8 or 9 years old, and I was told that ‘If he lives to 25 years old he’ll be lucky’; so we were lucky!”

Despite having to stick to a certain diet and daily injections, neither he nor his parents let diabetes hold him back from being a child. Growing up, and even up until marriage, his mother always made him stick to a certain treatment whenever he would get ready to go about his day.

“I’ll give the whole credit to my mother’s strength to let a 10-year-old go out with a bunch of kids on the street and play, run, kick balls, build forts, go into the woods and looking for bugs, and everything,” Rubin said. “She never let the disease stop me, and the only thing she said to me was, ‘When you go out, you put three lumps of sugar in your pocket, you know what to do with them; you always carry them with you.’”

Even after Rubin was married, he said, “She was telling me, ‘You sure you got three lumps of sugar in your pocket?’ Because running a low blood sugar is much more dangerous than running a high blood sugar. And this was her cure; she was right. More sugar is the best thing to take.”

However, self-treatment has improved over time thanks to technology such as smart phones and glucose monitors.

“Now they have a glucose sensor that’s implanted in your body, and the results can be read on a cell phone,” Rubin said. “I hope that children today have more of an opportunity than I had because they can have such control over their blood sugar. And of course, the more you can keep it on a normal run, the healthier you’re going to be.”

Rubin is always looking to give his message of wisdom to diabetic patients. “A couple of them have said to me after conversations ... ‘You know, I’m glad I talked to you. You’ve been living with it so long, and you’ve given me another slant on things.’” he said. “And it feels good to take my situation and try to help somebody who perhaps wasn’t as fortunate as I am.”

Diabetes can be scary to live with. But compared to what life was like many years ago, people today have so many more opportunities for getting the right treatment and care for themselves that Rubin is heartened to think the medical situation is much easier to navigate.

“For children, it’s a godsend,” he said. “A 4-, 5- or 6-year-old child ... it’s so wonderful now that the pump will give out a signal that a smartphone can pick up and his parents at home will know what’s happening. Where in my first 40 years, nobody knew anything other than you took insulin and you ate food.”

Rubin said it’s a bit of a miracle that without today’s interventions he has stayed healthy so long.

“It had to be that maybe the good Lord gave me that extra feeling in my body where I could feel my blood sugars rising or feel my blood sugars falling,” he said.

His final advice: “Don’t let the disease control you; you control the disease!”

Andrew Hubschman is a Mitchell College student and intern for the Times.