“We used to call it sugar. ‘I’ve got sugar.’ They didn’t know that much about it.”

But times have changed for Gladys Knight. Today, the 64-year-old Grammy winner is intimately aware that diabetes is about more than having “sugar”—and she’s making sure others know it, too. Although Knight herself does not have diabetes, she bore first-hand witness to its ravages as her mother, Elizabeth, coped with the disease for decades, relying on peritoneal dialysis for years before ultimately dying from complications owing to type 2 diabetes in 1997 (a brother and cousin also suffer from the disease). “When a loved one has a disease, it can touch the whole family,” she says. To honor her mother’s memory, Knight partnered with the American Diabetes Association (ADA) to create the Elizabeth Knight Fund, which supports community-awareness programs and peer-reviewed diabetes research to advance the basic science and clinical understanding of the disease. “I’m always fund-raising,” she says. “Education is first. It’s the most tangible part of what we do. We need money for research.”

The importance of the Elizabeth Knight Fund and others like it cannot be overstated; still, it is Knight’s own voice that seems to have the most impact. “We have to be aggressive with our own health,” she cautions. “You have to ask for a diabetes test. And you need to get your eyes checked, too. We don’t take care of our eyes as well as we should. One of the side effects of diabetes is losing our sight. People should be on top of it. Wear glasses if you need to. Don’t be so vain.” In fact, like so many diabetes sufferers, Elizabeth Knight developed blindness as a result of her disease.

In spite of the proven hereditary factor tied to diabetes, Knight and her children have, thus far, dodged the disease, perhaps because of the many lifestyle changes she has incorporated. “We look forward to getting checkups,” she says. “We control our diet. We take vitamins. We watch what we eat.”

It’s a far cry from how she was raised: “When I was a little girl, we weren’t so diet-conscious. We just ate whatever. But society as a whole gradually turned toward better foods—not all of those preservatives. I would love to go back to yesterday for some of those delicious things we had, but since we can’t do that, we have to look toward the future. We have to be informed. We have to know what we’re eating.”

To that end, Knight worked with the ADA to write a diabetes-aware cookbook, At Home With Gladys Knight. And in the four restaurants she owns and runs with her son, the menus are diabetes-friendly. “We have all of the Southern-cooking recipes,” says the Atlanta native. “Chicken and waffles, the best mac-and-cheese in the world … Do you think I’m going to give up my collard greens just because I can’t put my salt pork in them? No. Instead, we find a healthier way. There are a thousand ways to slice out the fat and still get the flavor.”

It’s a metaphor, perhaps, for the manner in which she balances her own very rich life. “I’ve always tried to live my life in a way that makes a difference to my family and to the rest of the people I love,” she says. “I try to teach people how to be healthy and take care of themselves—how to heal their souls. Because that’s what life is really about: It’s the body and your soul.”