Eating Healthy - How to Decrease Cholesterol and Blood Pressure

I am Diana Mirkin and I am going to talk with you about using diet to control cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes. Dr. Mirkin and I are not alone in telling you that you can do these things. There have been a tremendous number of research studies showing that blood pressure can be controlled with diet, that you can lower cholesterol with diet and that certainly, you can control or severely improve your diabetic state with diet alone. There is one particular program that I would like to focus on; it is called the Dash Diet. This is a diet that was developed by NIH and tested at five major medical centers including Harvard, Duke and John Hopkins. This is a diet that is very high in vegetables and very low in processed foods, meat and other sources of saturated fats. So, I am going to tell you a little bit about the dash diet and then we are going to learn how you can incorporate it into your life. The dash diet is whole grains, eight servings a day, five or more servings of vegetables, five or more servings of fruit. That is a lot of fruits and vegetables. You can have as many beans and legumes if you want, you can have seafood, you can have seeds and nuts in limited quantities, you can have three servings a day or less of low fat dairy products. You can have a little bit of olive oil which lets you dress a salad nicely and you would notice that there are a lot of things that you are not having. You are not having high sources of saturated fats, you are not having high sources of refined carbohydrates and you are avoiding lots and lots of processed foods. I would like to take a few moments in our next section to explain to you how you can incorporate this into your daily life.